UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SAN  0^^^^^^ 


3  1822  02256  1286 


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UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA.  SAN  DIEGO 


3  1822  02256  1286 


Social  Sciences  &  Humanities  Library 

University  of  California,  San  Diego 
Please  Note:  This  Item  is  subject  to  recall. 

Date  Due 

JUN  041997 

AUG  0  9  1999 

1 

CI  39  (2/95)                                                                   UCSDLb. 

EUPHORION.. 


AU  Rig /its  Reserved, 


t-TLfiftitj      Violet  ;j 


EUPHORION: 


STUDIES   OF  THE   ANTIQUE   AND   THE   MEDIAEVAL 
IN    THE   RENAISSANCE 


BY 

VERNON    LEE   cJ»>se.a<4o 


Third  Edition 


BOSTON 
ROBERTS    BROTHERS 


'^^r 


WALTER     PATER, 

IN    APPRECIATION    OF    THAT    WHICH,    IN     EXPOUNDING    THE 

BEAUTIFUL    THINGS    OF    THE    PAST,    HE    HAS    ADDED    TO 

THE    BEAUTIFUL   THINGS    OF    THE    PRESENT. 


TABLE   OF  CONTENTS. 

I'ACK 

INTRODUCTION I 

THE    SACRIFICE 25 

THE  ITALY  OF  THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS  5  5 

THE    OUTDOOR    POETRY            ....  IO9 

SYMMETRIA    PRISCA 1 67 

THE    PORTRAIT    ART 21  5 

THE    SCHOOL    OF    BOIARDO          .          .          .          .  261 

MEDL^iVAL    LOVE      .                    ....  2>35 

EPILOGUE        ....          ....  433 

APPENDIX            - 449 


INTRODUCTION'. 


INTRODUCTION. 


Faustus  is  tlierefore  a  parable  of  the  impotent  yearnings  of  the  Middle  Ages — its 
passionate  aspiration,  its  conscience-stricken  desire,  its  fettered  curiosity  amid  thr 
cramping  limits  of  imperfect  knowledge  and  irrational  dogmatism.  The  inde- 
structible beauty  of  Greek  art,  -whereof  Helen  was  an  emblem,  became,  through  tlie 
discovery  of  classic  poetry  and  sculpture,  the  possession  of  the  modern  world. 
Medicevalism  took  this  Helen  to  wife,  and  tlieir  offspring,  the  Euphorion  of 
Goethe' s  drama,  is  the  spirit  of  tlu  modern  world.—}.  A.  Symonds,  "Renaissance 
in  Italy,"  vol.  ii.  p.  54. 

Euphorion  is  the  name  given  by  Goethe  to  the 
marvellous  child  born  of  the  mystic  marriage  of  Faust 
and  Helena.  Who  Faust  is,  and  who  Helena,  we  all 
know.  Faust,  of  whom  no  man  can  remember  the 
youth  or  childhood,  seems  to  have  come  into  the 
world  by  some  evil  spell,  already  old  and  with  the 
faintness  of  body  and  of  mind  which  are  the  heritage 
of  age  ;  and  every  additional  year  of  mysterious  study 
and  abortive  effort  has  made  him  more  vacillating  of 
step  and  uncertain  of  sight,  but  only  more  hungry  of 
soul.  Postponed  and  repressed  by  reclusion  from  the 
world,  and  desperate  tension  over  insoluble  problems  ; 
diverted  into  the  channels  of  mere  thought  and  vision  ; 
there   boils   within   him   the  energy,  the  passion,  of 


4  EUPHORION. 

retarded  youth  :  its  appetites  and  curiosities,  which, 
cramped  by  the  intolerant  will,  and  foiled  by  many  a 
sudden  palsy  of  limb  and  mind,  torment  him  with 
mad  visions  of  unreal  worlds,  mock  him  with  dreams 
of  superhuman  powers,  from  which  he  awakes  in 
impotent  and  apathetic  anguish.  But  these  often- 
withstood  and  often-baffled  cravings  are  not  those 
merely  of  scholar  or  wizard,  they  are  those  of  soldier 
and  poet  and  monk,  of  the  mere  man  :  lawless  desires 
which  he  seeks  to  divert,  but  fails,  from  the  things  of 
the  flesh  and  of  the  world  to  the  things  of  the  reason  ; 
supersensuous  desires  for  the  beautiful  and  intangible, 
which  he  strives  to  crush,  but  in  vain,  with  the  cynical 
scepticism  of  science,  which  derides  the  things  it  cannot 
grasp.  In  this  strange  Faustus,  made  up  of  so  many 
and  conflicting  instincts  ;  in  this  old  man  with  ever- 
budding  and  ever-nipped  feelings  of  youthfulness, 
muddling  the  hard-won  secrets  of  nature  in  search 
after  impossibilities  ;  in  him  so  all-sided,  and  yet  so 
wilfully  narrowed,  so  restlessly  active,  yet  so  often  pal- 
sied and  apathetic ;  in  this  Faustus,  who  has  laboured 
so  much  and  succeeded  in  so  little,  feeling  himself  at 
the  end,  when  he  has  summed  up  all  his  studies,  as 
foolish  as  before — which  of  us  has  not  learned  to 
recognize  the  impersonated  Middle  Ages  ?  And 
Helena,  we  know  her  also,  she  is  the  spirit  of  Anti- 
quity. Personified,  but  we  dare  scarcely  say,  em- 
bodied ;  for  she  is  a  ghost  raised  by  the  spells  of 
Faustus,  a  simulacrum  of  a  thing  long  dead  ;  yet  with 


INTRODUCTION.  5 

such  continuing  semblance  of  life,  nay,  with  all  life's 
real  powers,  that  she  seems  the  real,  vital,  living  one, 
and  Faustus  yonder,  thing  as  he  is  of  the  present, 
little  better  than  a  spectre.  Yet  Helena  has  been 
ages  before  Faust  ever  was  ;  nay,  by  an  awful  mys- 
tery like  those  which  involve  the  birth  of  Pagan  gods, 
she  whom  he  has  evoked  to  be  the  mother  of  his  only 
son  has  given,  centuries  before,  somewhat  of  her  life 
to  make  this  self-same  Faust.  A  strange  mystery  of 
Fate's  necromancy  this,  and  with  strange  anomalies. 
For  opposite  this  living,  decrepit  Faust,  Helena,  the 
long  dead,  is  young  ;  and  she  is  all  that  which  Faust 
is  not.  Knowing  much  less  than  he,  who  has  plunged 
his  thoughts  like  his  scalpel  into  all  the  mysteries  cf 
life  and  death,  she  yet  knows  much  more,  can  tell 
him  of  the  objects  and  aims  of  men  and  things  ;  nay, 
with  little  more  than  the  unconscious  faithfulness  to 
instinct  of  the  clean-limbed,  placid  brute,  she  can 
give  peace  to  his  tormented  conscience  ;  and,  while 
he  has  suffered  and  struggled  and  lashed  himself  for 
every  seeming  baseness  of  desire,  and  loathed  himself 
for  every  imagined  microscopic  soiling,  she  has 
walked  through  good  and  evil,  letting  the  vileness  of 
sin  trickle  off  her  unhidden  soul,  so  quietly  and 
majestically  that  all  thought  of  evil  vanishes  ;  and 
the  self-tormenting  wretch,  with  macerated  flesh  hid- 
den beneath  the  heavy  garments  of  mysticism  and 
philosophy,  suddenly  feels,  in  the  presence  of  her  un- 
abashed nakedness,  that  he,  like  herself,  is  chaste. 


6  E  UP  NORTON. 

Such  are  the  parents,  Faustus  and  Helena  ;  we  know 
them  ;  but  who  is  this  son  Euphorion  ?  To  me  it 
seems  as  if  there  could  be  but  one  answer — the  Re- 
naissance. Goethe  indeed  has  told  us  (though,  with  his 
rejuvenation  of  Faustus,  unknown  to  the  old  German 
legend  and  to  our  Marlowe, in  how  bungling  a  manner!) 
the  tale  of  that  mystic  marriage  ;  but  Goethe  could 
not  tell  us  rightly,  even  had  he  attempted,  the  real 
name  of  its  offspring.  For  even  so  short  a  time  ago, 
the  Middle  Ages  were  only  beginning  to  Vje  more 
than  a  mere  historical  expression,  Antiquity  was  being 
only  then  critically  discovered  ;  and  the  Renaissance, 
but  vaguely  seen  and  quite  unformulated  by  the 
first  men.  Gibbon  and  Roscoe,  who  perceived  it  at 
all,  was  still  virtually  unknown.  To  Goethe,  there- 
fore, it  might  easily  have  seemed  as  if  the  antique 
Helena  had  only  just  been  evoked,  and  as  if  of  her 
union  with  the  worn-out  century  of  his  birth,  a  real 
Euphorion,  the  age  in  which  ourselves  are  living, 
might  have  been  born.  But,  at  the  distance  of  addi- 
tional time,  and  from  the  undreamed-of  height  upon 
which  recent  historical  science  has  enabled  us  to  stand, 
we  can  easily  see  that  in  this  he  would  have  been 
mistaken.  Not  only  is  our  modern  culture  no  child  of 
Faustus  and  Helena,  but  it  is  the  complex  descendant, 
strangely  featured  by  atavism  from  various  sides,  of 
many  and  various  civilizations  ;  and  the  eighteenth 
century,  so  far  from  being  a  Faustus  evoking  as  his 
bride  the  long  dead  Helen  of  Antiquity,  was  in  itself  a 


INTRODUCTION.  7 

curiously  varied  grandchild  or  great-grandchild  of  such 
a  marriage,  its  every  moral  feature,  its  every  intellectual 
movement  proclaiming  how  much  of  its  being  was  in- 
herited from  Antiquity.  No  allegory,  I  well  know,. 
and  least  of  all  no  historical  allegory,  can  ever  be 
strained  to  fit  quite  tight — the  lives  of  individuals  and 
those  of  centuries,  their  modes  of  intermixture,  genesis^ 
and  inheritance  are  far  different  ;  but  if  an  allegory  is 
to  possess  any  meaning  at  all,  we  must  surely  apply  it 
wherever  it  will  fit  most  easily  and  completely  ;  and 
the  beautiful  allegory  prepared  by  the  tradition  of  the 
sixteenth  century  for  the  elaborating  genius  of  Goethe„ 
can  have  a  real  meaning  only  if  we  explain  Faust  as  re- 
presenting the  Middle  Ages,  Helena  as  Antiquity,  and 
Euphorion  as  that  child  of  the  Middle  Ages,  taking. 
life  and  reality  from  them,  but  born  of  and  curiously 
nurtured  by  the  spirit  of  Antiquity,  to  which  significant 
accident  has  given  the  name  of  Renaissance. 

After  Euphorion  I  have  therefore  christened  this 
book ;  and  this  not  from  any  irrational  conceit  of 
knowing  more  (when  I  am  fully  aware  that  I  know 
infinitely  less)  than  other  writers  about  the  life  and 
characterof  this  wonderful  child  of  Helenaand  Faustus, 
but  merely  because  it  is  more  particularly  as  the  off- 
spring of  this  miraculous  marriage,  and  with  reference 
to  the  harmonies  and  anomalies  which  therefrom 
resulted,  that  Euphorion  has  exercised  my  thoughts. 

The  Renaissance  has  interested  and  interests  me,  not 
merely  for  what  it  is,  but  even  more  for  what  it  sprang 


8  E  UP H  ORION. 

from,  and  for  the  manner  in  which  the  many  things 
inherited  from  both  Middle  Ages  and  Renaissance,  the 
tendencies    and  necessities  inherent  in  every  special 
civilization,  acted  and  reacted  upon  each  other,  united 
in  concord  or  antagonism  ;  forming,  like  the  gases  of 
the  chemist,  new  things,  sometimes  like  and  sometimes 
unlike   themselves  and    each  other;   producing   now 
some  unknown  substance  of  excellence  and  utility,  at 
other  times  some  baneful  element,  known  but  too  well 
elsewhere,  but  unexpected  here.     But  not  the  watch- 
ing of  the  often  tragic  meeting  of  these  great  fatalities 
of  inherited  spirit    and  habit  only  :  for  equally    fas- 
cinating almost  has  been  the  watching  of  the  elabo- 
ration by  this  double-natured  period  of  things  of  little 
weight,  mere  trifles  of  artistic  material  bequeathed  to 
it  by  one  or  by  the  other  of  its  spiritual  parents.     The 
charm  for  me — a  charm  sometimes  pleasurable,  but 
sometimes  also  painful,  like  the  imperious  necessity 
which  we  sometimes  feel  to  see  again  and  examine, 
seemingly  uselessly,  some  horrible  evil — the  charm,  I 
mean  the  involuntary  compulsion    of  attention,  has 
often  been  as  great  in  following  the  vicissitudes  of  a 
mere  artistic  item,  like  the  Carolingian  stories  or  the 
bucolic  element,  as  it  has  been  in  looking  on  at  the 
dissolution  of  moral  and    social    elements.     And  in 
this,  that  I  have  tried  to  understand  only  where  my 
curiosity   was    awakened,   tried    to    reconstruct  only 
where  my  fancy  was  taken  ;  in  short,  studied  of  this 
Renaissance  civilizati,on  only  as  much  or  as  little  as  I 


INTRODUCTION.  9 

■cared,  depends  all  the  incompleteness  and  irrelevancy 
and  unsatisfactoriness  of  this  book,  and  depends  also 
whatever  addition  to  knowledge  or  pleasure  it  may 
afford.  Were  I  desirous  of  giving  a  complete,  clear 
notion  of  the  very  complex  civilization  of  the  Renais- 
sance, a  kind  of  encyclopaedic  atlas  of  that  period, 
where  (by  a  double  power  which  history  alone  pos- 
sesses) you  could  see  at  once  the  whole  extent  and 
shape  of  this  historical  territory,  and  at  the  same  time, 
with  all  its  bosses  of  mountain  and  furrows  of  valley, 
the  exact  composition  of  all  its  various  earths  and 
waters,  the  exact  actual  colour  and  shape  of  all  its 
different  vegetations,  not  to  speak  of  its  big  towns 
and  dotting  villages ; — were  I  desirous  of  doing  this,  I 
should  not  merely  be  attempting  a  work  completely 
beyond  my  faculties,  but  a  work  moreover  already 
carried  out  with  all  the  perfection  due  to  specially 
•adapted  gifts,  to  infinite  patience  and  ingenuity,  oc- 
casionally amounting  almost  to  genius.  Such  is  not 
at  all  within  my  wishes,  as  it  assuredly  would  be 
totally  without  my  powers. 

But  besides  such  marvels  of  historic  mapping 
as  I  have  described,  where  every  one  can  find  at 
a  glance  whatever  he  may  be  looking  for,  and  get 
the  whole  topography,  geological  and  botanical, 
of  an  historic  tract  at  his  fingers'  ends,  there  are 
yet  other  kinds  of  work  which  may  be  done.  For  a 
period  in  history  is  like  a  more  or  less  extended  real 
landscape :  it  has,  if  you  will,  actual,  chemically  de- 


lo  EUPHORION. 

fined  colours  in  this  and  that,  if  you  consider  this  and 
that  separate  and  unaffected  by  any  kind  of  visual 
medium  ;  and  measurable  distances  also  between  this 
point  and  the  other,  if  you  look  down  upon  it  as  from 
a  balloon.  But,  like  a  real  landscape,  it  may  also  be 
seen  from  different  points  of  view,  and  under  different 
lights  ;  then,  according  as  you  stand,  the  features  of 
the  scene  will  group  themselves — this  ridge  will  disap- 
pear behind  that,  this  valley  will  open  out  before  you, 
that  other  will  be  closed.  Similarly,  according  to  the 
light  wherein  the  landscape  is  seen,  the  relative  scale 
of  colours  and  tints  of  objects,  due  to  pervading  light 
and  to  distances — what  painters  call  the  values — will 
alter  :  the  scene  will  possess  one  or  two  predomi- 
nant effects,  it  will  produce  also  one  or,  at  most,  two» 
or  three  (in  which  case  co-ordinated)  impressions. 
The  art  which  deals  with  impressions,  which  tries  tO' 
seize  the  real  relative  values  of  colours  and  tints  at  a 
given  moment,  is  what  you  call  new-fangled  :  its  doc- 
trines and  works  are  still  subject  to  the  reproach  of 
charlatanry.  Yet  it  is  the  only  truly  realistic  art,  and 
it  only,  by  giving  you  a  thing  as  it  appears  at  a  given 
moment,  gives  it  you  as  it  really  ever  is  ;  all  the  rest 
is  the  result  of  cunning  abstraction,  and  representing 
the  scene  as  it  is  always,  represents  it  (by  striking  an 
average)  as  it  never  is  at  all.  I  do  not  pretend  that 
in  questions  of  history  we  can  proceed  upon  the 
principles  of  modern  landscape  painting :  we  do  not 
know  what    were   the   elevations   which    made  per- 


INTRODUCTION.  ii 

spective,  what  were  the  effects  of  light  which  created 
scales  of  tints,  in  that  far  distant  country  of  the  past  ; 
and  it  is  safer  certainly,  and  doubtless  much  more 
useful,  to  strike  an  average,  and  represent  the  past  as 
seen  neither  from  here  nor  from  there,  neither  in  this 
light  nor  that,  and  let  each  man  imagine  his  historical 
perspective  and  colour  value  to  the  best  of  his  powers. 
Yet  it  is  nevertheless  certain  that  the  past,  to  the  people 
who  were  in  it,  was  not  a  miraculous  map  or  other 
marvellous  diagram  constructed  on  the  principle  of 
getting  at  the  actual  qualities  of  things  by  analysis; 
that  it  must  have  been,  to  its  inhabitants,  but  a  series 
of  constantly  varied  perspectives  and  constantly  varied 
schemes  of  colour,  according  to  the  position  of  each 
individual,  and  the  light  in  which  that  individual 
viewed  it.  To  attempt  to  reconstruct  those  various 
perspective-making  heights,  to  rearrange  those  various 
value-determining  lights,  would  be  to  the  last  degree 
disastrous  ;  we  should  have  valleys  where  there  existed 
mountains,  and  brilliant  warm  schemes  of  colour  where 
there  may  have  been  all  harmonies  of  pale  and  neutral 
tints.  Still  the  perspective  and  colour  valuation  of 
individual  minds  there  must  have  been  ;  and  since  it 
is  not  given  to  us  to  reproduce  those  of  the  near 
spectator  in  a  region  which  we  can  never  enter,  we 
may  yet  sometimes  console  ourselves  for  the  too 
melancholy  abstractness  and  averageness  of  scientific 
representations,  by  painting  that  distant  historic 
country  as  distant  indeed,  but  as  its  far-off  hill  ranges 


12  EUPHORION. 

and  shimmering  plains  really  appear  in  their  combina- 
tion of  form  and  colour,  from  the  height  of  an  indi- 
vidual interest  of  our  own,  and  beneath  the  light  of 
our  individual  character.  We  see  only  very  little  at 
a  time,  and  that  little  is  not  what  it  appeared  to  the 
men  of  the  past  ;  but  we  see  at  least,  if  not  the  same 
things,  yet  in  the  same  manner  in  which  they  saw,  as 
we  see  from  the  standpoints  of  personal  interest  and 
in  the  light  of  personal  temper.  Scientifically  we 
doubtless  lose;  but  is  the  past  to  be  treated  only 
scientifically  ?  and  can  it  not  give  us,  and  do  we  not 
owe  it,  something  more  than  a  mere  understanding  of 
why  and  how .-'  Is  it  a  thing  so  utterly  dead  as  to  be 
fit  only  for  the  scalpel  and  the  microscope  ? 

Surely  not  so.  The  past  can  give  us,  and  should 
give  us,  not  merely  ideas,  but  emotions :  healthy 
pleasure  which  may  make  us  more  light  of  spirit, 
and  pain  which  may  make  us  more  earnest  of  mind  ; 
the  one,  it  seems  to  me,  as  necessary  for  our  indi- 
vidual worthiness  as  is  the  other.  For  to  each  of  us, 
as  we  watch  the  past,  as  we  lie  passive  and  let  it  slowly 
circulate  around  us,  there  must  come  sights  which,  in 
their  reality  or  in  their  train  of  associations,  and  to 
the  mind  of  each  differently,  must  gladden  as  with  a 
sense  of  beauty,  or  put  us  all  into  a  sullen  moral  ache. 
I  should  hate  to  be  misunderstood  in  this  more,  per- 
haps, than  in  anything  else  in  the  world.  I  speak  not 
of  any  dramatic  emotion,  of  such  egotistic,  half-artis- 
tic pleasure  as  some  may  get  from  the  alternation  of 


INTRODUCTION.  13 

cheerfulness  and  terror,  from  the  excitement  caused 
by  evil  from  which  we  are  as  safely  separated  as  are 
those  who  look  on  from  theenfuriate  bulls  in  an  arena. 
To  such,  history,  and  the  history  especially  of  the 
Renaissance,  has  been  made  to  pander  but  too  much. 
The  pain  I  speak  of  is  the  pain  which  must  come  to 
every  morally  sentient  creature  with  the  contempla- 
tion of  some  one  of  the  horrible  tangles  of  evil,  of  the 
still  fouler  intermeshing  of  evil  with  good,  which 
history  brings  up  ever  and  anon.  Evil  which  is  past, 
it  is  true,  but  of  which  the  worst  evil  almost  of  all,  the 
fact  of  its  having  been,  can  never  be  past,  must  ever 
remain  present ;  and  our  trouble  and  indignation  at 
which  is  holy,  our  pain  is  healthy :  holy  and  healthy, 
because  every  vibration  of  such  pain  as  that  makes  our 
moral  fibre  more  sensitive  ;  because  every  immunity 
from  such  sensation  deadens  our  higher  nature  :  holy 
and  healthy  also  because,  just  as  no  image  of  pleasurable 
things  can  pass  before  us  without  gathering  about  it 
other  images  of  some  beauty  which  have  long  lain  by 
in  each  individual  mind,  so  also  no  thought  of  great 
injustice  of  man  or  of  accident,  of  signal  whitewashing 
of  evil  or  befouling  of  good,  but  must,  in  striking  into 
our  soul,  put  in  motion  there  the  salutary  thought 
of  some  injustice  or  lying  legitimation  or  insidious 
pollution,  smaller  indeed  perhaps,  but  perhaps  also 
nearer  to  ourselves. 

Be  not  therefore  too  hard  upon  me  if  in  what  I 
have  written  of  the  Renaissance,  there   is  too  little 


14  EUPHORION. 

attempt  to  make  matters  scientifically  complete,  and 
too  much  giving  way  to  personal  and  perhaps  some- 
times irrelevant  impressions  of  pleasure  and  of  pain  ; 
if  I  have  followed  up  those  pleasurable  and  painful 
impressions  rather  more  than  sought  to  discover  the 
exact  geography  of  the  historical  tract  which  gave 
them.  Consider,  moreover,  that  this  very  cause  of  de- 
ficiency may  have  been  also  the  cause  of  my  having 
succeeded  in  achieving  anything  at  all.  Personal  im- 
pression has  led  me,  perhaps,  sometimes  away  from 
the  direct  road  ;  but  had  it  not  beckoned  me  to  follow, 
I  should  most  likely  have  simply  not  stirred.  Pleasant 
impression  and  painful,  as  I  have  said  ;  and  sometimes 
the  painful  has  been  more  efficacious  than  the  other. 
I  do  not  know  whether  the  interest  which  I  have 
always  taken  in  the  old  squabble  of  real  and  ideal 
has  enabled  me  to  make  at  all  clearer  the  different 
characteristics  of  painting  and  sculpture  in  Renaissance 
portraiture,  the  relation  of  the  art  of  Raphael  to  the 
art  of  Velasquez  and  the  art  of  Whistler.  I  can 
scarcely  judge  whether  the  pleasure  which  I  owe  to 
the  crowding  together,  the  moving  about  in  my  fancy, 
of  the  heroes  and  wizards  and  hippogriffs  of  the  old 
tales  of  Oberon  and  Ogier ;  the  association  with  the 
knights  and  ladies  of  Boiardo  and  Ariosto,  of  this  or 
that  figure  out  of  a  fresco  of  Pinturicchio,  or  a  picture 
by  Dosso,  has  made  it  easier  or  more  difficult  for 
me  to  sum  up  the  history  of  mediaeval  romance  in 
Renaissance    Italy;    nor  whether  the  recollection  of 


INTRO  D  UCTION.  1 5 

certain  Tuscan  farms,  the  well-known  scent  of  the 
sun-dried  fennel  and  mint  under  the  vine-trellis,  the 
droning  song  of  the  contadino  ploughing  or  pruning 
unseen  in  the  valley,  the  snatches  of  peasants'  rhymes, 
the  outlines  of  peasants'  faces — things  all  these  of  this 
our  own  time,  of  yesterday  or  to-day  ;  whether  all 
this,  running  in  my  mind  like  so  many  scribbly  illus- 
trations and  annotations  along  the  margin  of  Lorenzo 
dei  Medici's  poems,  has  made  my  studies  of  rustic 
poetry  more  clear  or  more  confused.  But  this  much  I 
know  as  a  certainty,  that  never  should  I  have  tried 
to  unravel  the  causes  of  the  Renaissance's  horrible 
anomaly  of  improvement  and  degradation,  had  not  that 
anomaly  returned  and  returned  to  make  me  wretched 
with  its  loathsome  mixture  of  good  and  evil ;  its  de- 
testable alternative  of  endurance  of  vile  solidarities  in 
the  souls  of  our  intellectual  forefathers,  or  of  unjust 
turning  away  from  the  men  and  the  times  whose  moral 
degradation  paid  the  price  of  our  moral  dignity.  I 
also  have  the  further  certainty  of  its  having  been  this 
long-endured  moral  sickening  at  the  sight  of  this 
moral  anomaly,  which  enabled  me  to  realize  the 
feelings  of  such  of  our  nobler  Elizabethan  playwrights 
as  sought  to  epitomize  in  single  tales  of  horror  the 
strange  impressions  left  by  the  accomplished  and 
infamous  Italy  of  their  day  ;  and  which  made  it  possible 
for  me  to  express  perhaps  some  of  the  trouble  which 
filled  the  mind  of  Webster  and  of  Tourneur  merely  by 
expressing  the  trouble  which  filled  my  own. 


i6  EUPHORION. 

The  following  studies  are  not  samples,  fragments  at 
which  one  tries  one's  hand,  of  some  large  and  metho- 
dical scheme  of  work.  They  are  mere  impressions 
developed  by  means  of  study  :  not  merely  currents  of 
thought  and  feeling  which  I  have  singled  out  from 
the  multifold  life  of  the  Renaissance  ;  but  currents  of 
thought  and  feeling  in  myself,  which  have  found  and 
swept  along  with  them  certain  items  of  Renaissance 
lore.  For  the  Renaissance  has  been  to  me,  in  the 
small  measure  in  which  it  has  been  anything,  not  so 
much  a  series  of  studies  as  a  series  of  impressions.  I 
have  not  mastered  the  history  and  literature  of  the 
Renaissance  (first-hand  or  second-hand,  perfectly  or 
imperfectly),  abstract  and  exact,  and  then  sought  out 
the  places  and  things  which  could  make  that  abstrac- 
tion somewhat  more  concrete  in  my  mind  ;  I  have 
seen  the  concrete  things,  and  what  I  might  call  the 
concrete  realities  of  thought  and  feeling  left  behind  by 
the  Renaissance,  and  then  tried  to  obtain  from  books 
some  notion  of  the  original  shape  and  manner  of  wear- 
ing these  relics,  rags  and  tatters  of  a  past  civilization. 

For  Italy,  beggared  and  maimed  (by  her  own  un- 
thrift,  by  the  rapacity  of  others,  by  the  order  of  Fate) 
at  the  beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century,  was  never 
able  to  weave  for  herself  a  new,  a  modern  civilization,  as 
did  the  nations  who  had  shattered  her  looms  on  which 
such  woofs  are  made,  and  carried  off  her  earnings  with 
which  such  things  may  be  bought  ;  and  she  had, 
accordingly,  to  go  through  life  in  the  old  garments, 


INTRODUCTION.  xj 

Still  half  mediseval  in  shape,  which  had  been  fashioned 
for  her  during  the  Renaissance  :  apparel  of  the  best 
that  could  then  be  made,  beautiful  and  strong  in  many 
ways,  so  beautiful  and  strong  indeed  as  to  impose  on 
people  for  a  good  long  time,  and  make  French,  and 
Germans,  and  Spaniards,  and  English  believe  (com- 
paring these  brilliant  tissues  with  the  homespun  they 
were  providing  for  themselves)  that  it  must  be  all 
brand  new,  and  of  the  very  latest  fashion.  But  the 
garments  left  to  Italy  by  those  latest  Middle  Ages 
which  we  call  Renaissance,  were  not  eternal :  wear  and 
tear,  new  occupations,  and  the  rough  usage  of  other 
nations,  rent  them  most  sorely  ;  their  utter  neglect 
by  the  long  seventeenth  century,  their  hasty  patchings 
up  (with  bits  of  odd  stuff  and  all  manner  of  coloured 
thread  and  string,  so  that  a  harlequin's  jacket  could 
not  look  queerer)  by  the  happy-go-lucky  practicalness 
of  the  eighteenth  century  and  the  Revolution,  reduced 
them  thoroughly  to  rags  ;  and  with  these  rags  of  Re- 
naissance civilization,  Italy  may  still  be  seen  to  drape 
herself.  Not  perhaps  in  the  great  centres,  where  the 
garments  of  modern  civilization,  economical,  unpic- 
turesque,  intended  to  be  worn  but  a  short  time,  have 
been  imported  from  other  countries ;  but  yet  in  many 
places.  Yes,  you  may  still  see  those  rags  of  the 
Renaissance  as  plainly  as  you  see  the  tattered  linen 
fluttering  from  the  twisted  iron  hooks  (made  for  the 
display  of  precious  brocades  and  carpets  on  pageant 
days)  which  still  remain  in  the  stained  whitewash,  the 


1 8  EUPHORION. 

seams  of  battered  bricks  of  the  solid  old  escutcheoned 
palaces  ;  see  them  sometimes  displayed  like  the  worm- 
eaten  squares  of  discoloured  embroidery  which  the 
curiosity  dealers  take  out  of  their  musty  oak  presses; 
and  sometimes  dragging  about  mere  useless  and  be- 
fouled odds  and  ends,  like  the  torn  shreds  which  lie 
among  the  decaying  kitchen  refuse,  the  broken  tiles 
and  plaster,  the  nameless  filth  and  ooze  which  attracts 
the  flies  under  every  black  archway,  in  every  steep 
bricked  lane  descending  precipitously  between  the 
high  old  houses.  Old  palaces,  almost  strongholds, 
and  which  are  still  inhabited  by  those  too  poor  to  pull 
them  down  and  build  some  plastered  bandbox  in- 
stead ;  poems  and  prose  tales  written  or  told  five 
hundred  years  ago,  edited  and  re-edited  by  printers 
to  whom  there  come  no  modern  poems  or  prose  tales 
worth  editing  instead  ;  half-pagan,  mediaeval  priest 
lore,  believed  in  by  men  and  women  who  have  not 
been  given  anything  to  believe  instead  ;  easy-going, 
all-permitting  fifteenth  century  scepticism,  not  yet 
replaced  by  the  scientific  and  socialistic  disbelief  which 
is  puritanic  and  iconoclastic  ;  sly  and  savage  habits  of 
vengeance  still  doing  service  among  the  lower  classes 
instead  of  the  orderly  chicanery  of  modern  justice  ; 
— these  are  the  things,  and  a  hundred  others  besides, 
concrete  and  spiritual,  things  too  magnificent,  too 
sordid,  too  irregular,  too  nauseous,  too  beautiful,  and, 
above  all,  too  utterly  unpractical  and  old-fashioned  for 
our  times,  which  I  call  the  rags  of  the  Renaissance, 


INTRODUCTION.  19 

and  with  which  Italy  still  ekes  out  her  scanty  apparel 
of  modern  thoughts  and  things. 

It  is  living  among  such  things,  turn  by  turn  delighted 
by  their  beauty  and  offended  by  their  foulness,  that 
one  acquires  the  habit  of  spending  a  part  only  of 
one's  intellectual  and  moral  life  in  the  present,  and 
the  rest  in  the  past.  Impressions  are  not  derived  from 
description,  and  thoughts  are  not  suggested  by  books. 
The  juxtaposition  of  concrete  objects  invites  the 
making  of  a  theory  as  the  jutting  out  of  two  branches 
invites  the  spinning  of  a  spider's  web.  You  find 
everywhere  your  facts  without  opening  a  book.  The 
explanation  which  I  have  tried  to  give  of  the  exact 
manner  in  which  mediaeval  art  was  influenced  by  the 
remains  of  antiquity,  came  like  a  flash  during  a  rainy 
morning  in  the  Pisan  Campo  Santo  ;  the  working  out 
and  testing  of  that  explanation  in  its  details  was  a 
matter  of  going  from  one  church  or  gallery  to  the 
other,  a  reference  or  two  to  Vasari  for  some  date  or 
fact  being  the  only  necessary  reading ;  and  should 
any  one  at  this  moment  ask  me  for  substantiation  of 
that  theory,  instead  of  opening  books  I  would  take 
that  person  to  this  Sienese  Cathedral,  and  there  bid 
him  compare  the  griffins  and  arabesques,  the  delicate 
figure  and  foliage  ornaments  carved  in  wood  and 
marble  by  the  latter  Middle  Ages,  with  the  griffins 
and  arabesques,  the  boldly  bossed  horsemen,  the  ex- 
quisite fruit  garlands  of  a  certain  antique  altar  stone 
which  the  builders  of  the  church  used  as  a  base  to  a 


20  EVPHORION. 

pillar,  and  which  must  have  been  a  never-ceasing 
object  of  study  to  every  draughtsman  and  stone- 
worker  in  Siena. 

Nor  are  such  everywhere-scattered  facts  ready  for 
working  into  theoretic  shape,  the  most  which  Italy 
still  affords  to  make  the  study  of  the  Renaissance  an 
almost  involuntary  habit.  In  certain  places  where 
only  decay  has  altered  things  from  what  they  were 
four  centuries  ago,  Perugia,  Orvieto,  S.  Gimignano,  in 
the  older  quarters  of  Florence,  Venice,  and  Verona, 
but  nowhere  I  think  so  much  as  in  this  city  of  Siena 
(as  purely  mediaeval  as  the  suits  of  rusted  armour 
which  its  townsfolk  patch  up  and  bury  themselves  in 
during  their  August  pageants),  we  are  subjected  to 
receive  impressions  of  the  past  so  startlingly  life-like 
as  to  get  quite  interwoven  with  our  impressions  of  the 
present  ;  and  from  that  moment  the  past  must  share, 
in  a  measure,  some  of  the  everyday  thoughts  which 
we  give  to  the  present.  In  such  a  city  as  this,  the 
sudden  withdrawal,  by  sacristan  or  beggar-crone,  of 
the  curtain  from  before  an  altar-piece  is  many  a  time 
much  more  than  the  mere  displaying  of  a  picture  :  it 
is  the  sudden  bringing  us  face  to  face  with  the  real 
life  of  the  Renaissance.  We  have  ourselves,  perhaps 
not  an  hour  before,  sauntered  through  squares  and 
dawdled  beneath  porticos  like  those  which  we  see 
filled  with  the  red-robed  and  plumed  citizens  and 
patricians,  the  Jews  and  ruffians  whom  Pinturicchio's 
parti-coloured    men-at-arms   are  dispersing  to  make 


INTRODUCTION.  2i 

room  for  the  followers  of  ^neas  Sylvius  ;  or  clambered 
up  rough  lanes,  hedged  in  between  oak  woods  and 
oliveyards,  which  we  might  almost  swear  were  the 
very  ones  through  which  are  winding  Sodoma's  caval- 
cades of  gallantly  dressed  gentlemen,  with  their  hawks 
and  hounds,  and  negro  jesters  and  apes  and  beautiful 
pages,  cantering  along  on  shortnecked  little  horses 
with  silver  bits  and  scarlet  trappings,  on  the  pretence 
of  being  the  Kings  from  the  East,  carrying  gold  and 
myrrh  to  the  infant  Christ.  It  seems  as  if  all  were 
astoundingly  real,  as  if,  by  some  magic,  we  were 
actually  going  to  mix  in  the  life  of  the  past.  But  it 
is  in  reality  but  a  mere  delusion,  a  deceit  like  those 
dioramas  which  we  have  all  been  into  as  children,  anc 
where,  by  paying  your  shilling,  you  were  suddenly 
introduced  into  an  oasis  of  the  desert,  or  into  a  recent 
battle-field :  things  which  surprised  us,  real  palm 
trunks  and  Arabian  water  jars,  or  real  fascines  and 
cannon  balls,  lying  about  for  us  to  touch  ;  roads  open- 
ing on  all  sides  into  this  simulated  desert,  through  this 
simulated  battle-field.  So  also  with  these  seeming 
realities  of  Renaissance  life.  We  can  touch  the  things 
scattered  on  the  foreground,  can  handle  the  weapons, 
the  furniture,  the  books  and  musical  instruments  ;  we 
can  see,  or  think  we  see,  most  plainly  the  streets  and 
paths,  the  faces  and  movements  of  that  Renaissance 
world  ;  but  when  we  try  to  penetrate  into  it,  we 
shall  find  that  there  is  but  a  slip  of  solid  ground 
beneath   us,  that   all    around    us  is   but  canvas  and 


22  E  UP  H  ORION. 

painted  wall,  perspectived  and  lit  up  by  our  fancy ; 
and  that  when  we  try  to  approach  to  touch  one  of  those 
seemingly  so  real  men  and  women,  our  eyes  find  only 
daubs  of  paint,  our  hands  meet  only  flat  and  chilly 
stucco.  Turn  we  to  our  books,  and  seek  therein  the 
spell  whereby  to  make  this  simulacrum  real ;  and  I 
think  the  plaster  will  still  remain  plaster,  the  stones 
still  remain  stone.  Out  of  the  Renaissance,  out  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  we  must  never  hope  to  evoke  any  spectres 
which  can  talk  with  us  and  we  with  them  ;  nothing 
of  the  kind  of  those  dim  but  familiar  ghosts,  often 
grotesque  rather  than  heroic,  who  come  to  us  from 
out  of  the  books,  the  daubed  portraits  of  times  nearer 
our  own,  and  sit  opposite  us,  making  us  laugh,  and 
also  cry,  with  humdrum  stories  and  humdrum  woes  so 
very  like  our  own.  No  ;  such  ghosts  the  Renaissance 
has  not  left  behind  it.  From  out  of  it  there  come  to 
us  no  familiars.  They  are  all  faces — those  which  meet 
us  in  the  pages  of  chronicles  and  in  the  frames  of 
pictures  :  they  are  painted  records  of  the  past — we  may 
understand  them  by  scanning  well  their  features,  but 
they  cannot  understand,  they  cannot  perceive  us. 
Such,  when  all  is  said,  are  my  impressions  of  the 
Renaissance.  The  moral  atmosphere  of  those  days  is 
as  impossible  for  us  to  breathe  as  would  be  the  physical 
atmosphere  of  the  moon :  could  we,  for  a  moment, 
penetrate  into  it,  we  should  die  of  asphyxia.  Say  what 
we  may  against  both  Protestant  reformation  and 
Catholic  reaction,  these  two  began  to  make  an  atmo- 


INTRODUCTION.  23 

sphere  (pure  or  foul)  different  from  that  of  the  Middle 
Ages  and  the  Renaissance,  an  atmosphere  in  which 
lived  creatures  like  ourselves,  into  which  ourselves 
might  penetrate. 

A  crotchet  this,  perhaps,  of  my  own  ;  but  it  is  my 
feeling,  nevertheless.  The  Renaissance  is,  I  say  again, 
no  period  out  of  which  we  must  try  and  evoke  ghostly 
companions.  Let  us  not  waste  our  strength  in  seeking 
to  do  so  ;  but  be  satisfied  if  it  teaches  us  strange 
truths,  scientific  and  practical ;  if  its  brilliant  and 
solemn  personalities,  its  bright  and  majestic  art  can 
give  us  pleasure  ;  if  its  evils  and  wrongs,  its  inevitable 
degradation,  can  move  us  to  pity  and  to  indignation. 

Siena, 
September,  1882. 


THE  SACRIFICE 


THE  SACRIFICE. 


Ikr/iihrt  ins  Lebeit  uns  kinein; 
Ihr  Idsst  den  arinen  schuldi^  werden; 
Dann  iibergiebt  Ihr  ihn  der  Pein, 
Denn  alle  Sckuld  racht  sich  auf  Erden. 

At  the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century,  Italy  was  the 
centre  of  European  civilization  :  while  the  other 
nations  were  still  plunged  in  a  feudal  barbarism  which 
seems  almost  as  far  removed  from  all  our  sympathies 
as  is  the  condition  of  some  American  or  Polynesian 
savages,  the  Italians  appear  to  us  as  possessing  habits 
of  thought,  a  mode  of  life,  political,  social,  and  lite- 
rary institutions,  not  unlike  those  of  to-day  ;  as  men 
whom  we  can  thoroughly  understand,  whose  ideas 
and  aims,  whose  general  views,  resemble  our  own  in 
that  main,  indefinable  characteristic  of  being  modern. 
They  had  shaken  off  the  morbid  monastic  ways  of 
feeling,  they  had  thrown  aside  the  crooked  scholastic 
modes  of  thinking,  they  had  trampled  under  foot  the 
feudal  institutions  of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  no  symbolical 
mists  made  them  see  things  vague,  strange,  and  dis- 
torted ;  their  intellectual  atmosphere  was  as  clear  as 


28  EUPHORION. 

our  own,  and,  if  they  saw  less  than  we  do,  what  they 
did  see  appeared  to  them  in  its  true  shape  and  pro- 
portions. Almost  for  the  first  time  since  the  ruin  of 
antique  civilization,  they  could  show  well-organized, 
well-defined  States ;  artistically  disciplined  armies  ; 
rationally  devised  laws ;  scientifically  conducted  agri- 
culture ;  and  widely  extended,  intelligently  undertaken 
commerce.  For  the  first  time,  also,  they  showed 
regularly  built,  healthy,  and  commodious  towns  ;  well- 
drained  fields  ;  and,  more  important  than  all,  hundreds 
of  miles  of  country  owned  not  by  feudal  lords,  but  by 
citizens  ;  cultivated  not  by  serfs,  but  by  free  peasants. 
While  in  the  rest  of  Europe  men  were  floundering 
among  the  stagnant  ideas  and  crumbling  institutions 
of  the  effete  Middle  Ages,  with  but  a  vague  half- 
consciousness  of  their  own  nature,  the  Italians 
walked  calmly  through  a  life  as  well  arranged  as  their 
great  towns,  bold,  inquisitive,  and  sceptical :  modern 
administrators,  modern  soldiers,  modern  politicians, 
modern  financiers,  scholars,  and  thinkers.  Towards 
the  end  of  the  fifteenth  century,  Italy  seemed  to  have 
obtained  the  philosophic,  literary,  and  artistic  inherit- 
ance of  Greece  ;  the  administrative,  legal,  and  military 
inheritance  of  Rome,  increased  threefold  by  her  own 
strong,  original,  essentially  modern  activities. 

Yet,  at  that  very  time,  and  almost  in  proportion  as 
all  these  advantages  developed,  the  moral  vitality  of 
the  Italians  was  rapidly  decreasing,  and  a  horrible 
moral  gangrene   beginning   to    spread  :    liberty   was 


THE  SACRIFICE.  29 

extinguished  ;  public  good  faith  seemed  to  be  dying 
out ;  even  private  morality  flickered  ominously  ;  ever>- 
free  State  became  subject  to  a  despot,  always  unscru- 
pulous and  often  infamous  ;  warfare  became  a  mere 
pretext  for  the  rapine  and  extortions  of  mercenaries  ; 
diplomacy  grew  to  be  a  mere  swindle  ;  the  humanists 
inoculated  literature  with  the  filthiest  refuse  cast  up 
by  antiquity  ;  nay,  even  civic  and  family  ties  were 
loosened ;  assassinations  and  fratricides  began  to 
abound,  and  all  law,  human  and  divine,  to  be  set  at 
defiance. 

The  nations  who  came  into  contact  with  the 
Italians  opened  their  eyes  with  astonishment,  with 
mingled  admiration  and  terror  ;  and  we,  people  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  are  filled  with  the  same  feeling, 
only  much  stronger  and  more  defined,  as  we  watch 
the  strange  ebullition  of  the  Renaissance,  seething 
with  good  and  evil,  as  we  contemplate  the  enigmatic 
picture  drawn  by  the  puzzled  historian,  the  picture  of 
a  people  moving  on  towards  civilization  and  towards 
chaos.  Our  first  feeling  is  perplexity ;  our  second 
feeling,  anger ;  we  do  not  at  first  know  whether  we 
ought  to  believe  in  such  an  anomaly  ;  when  once  we 
do  believe  in  it,  we  are  indignant  at  its  existence. 
We  accuse  these  Italians  of  the  Renaissance  of  having 
wilfully  and  shamefully  perverted  their  own  powers, 
of  having  wantonly  corrupted  their  own  civilization, 
of  having  cynically  destroyed  their  own  national  exist- 
ence, of  having  boldly  called  down  the  vengeance  of 


30  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

Heaven  ;  we  lament  and  we  accuse,  naturally  enough, 
but  perhaps  not  justly. 

Let  us  ask  ourselves  what  the  Renaissance  really 
was,  and  what  was  its  use ;  how  it  was  produced,  and 
how  it  necessarily  ended.  Let  us  try  to  understand 
its  inherent  nature,  and  the  nature  of  what  surrounded 
it,  which,  taken  together,  constitute  its  inevitable  fate  ; 
let  us  seek  the  explanation  of  that  strange,  anomalous 
civilization,  of  that  life  in  death,  and  death  in  life. 

The  Renaissance,  inasmuch  as  it  is  something 
which  we  can  define,  and  not  a  mere  vague  name  for 
a  certain  epoch,  is  not  a  period,  but  a  condition  ;  and 
if  we  apply  the  word  to  any  period  in  particular,  it  is 
because  in  it  that  condition  was  peculiarly  marked. 
The  Renaissance  may  be  defined  as  being  that  phase 
in  mediaeval  history  in  which  the  double  influence, 
feudal  and  ecclesiastic,  which  had  gradually  crushed 
the  spontaneous  life  of  the  early  mediaeval  revival,  and 
reduced  all  to  a  dead,  sterile  mass,  was  neutralized  by 
the  existence  of  democratic  and  secular  communities  ; 
that  phase  in  which,  while  there  existed  not  yet  any 
large  nations,  or  any  definite  national  feeling,  there 
existed  free  towns  and  civic  democracies.  In  this 
sense  the  Renaissance  began  to  exist  with  the  earliest 
mediaeval  revival,  but  its  peculiar  mission  could  be 
carried  out  only  when  that  general  revival  had  come 
to  an  end.  In  this  sense,  also,  the  Renaissance  did  not 
exist  all  over  Italy,  and  it  existed  outside  Italy  ;  but 
in  Italy  it  was  far  more   universal  than  elsewhere  : 


THE  SACRIFICE.  31 

there  it  was  the  rule,  elsewhere  the  exception.  There 
was  no  Renaissance  in  Savoy,  nor  in  Naples,  nor  even 
in  Rome  ;  but  north  of  the  Alps  there  was  Renais- 
sance only  in  individual  towns  like  Nurnberg,  Augs- 
burg, Bruges,  Ghent,  &c.  In  the  North  the  Renais- 
sance is  dotted  about  amidst  the  stagnant  Middle 
Ages  ;  in  Italy  the  Middle  Ages  intersect  and  inter- 
rupt the  Renaissance  here  and  there  :  the  consequence 
was  that  in  the  North  the  Renaissance  was  crushed 
by  the  Middle  Ages,  whereas  in  Italy  the  Middle 
Ages  were  crushed  by  the  Renaissance.  Wherever 
there  was  a  free  town,  without  direct  dependence  on 
feudal  or  ecclesiastical  institutions,  governed  by  its 
own  citizens,  subsisting  by  its  own  industry  and  com- 
merce ;  wherever  the  burghers  built  walls,  slung 
chains  across  their  streets,  and  raised  their  own  cathe- 
dral ;  wherever,  be  it  in  Germany,  in  Flanders,  or  in 
England,  there  was  a  suspension  of  the  deadly  in- 
fluences of  the  later  Middle  Ages  ;  there,  to  greater 
or  less  extent,  was  the  Renaissance. 

But  in  the  North  this  rudimentary  Renaissance  was 
never  suffered  to  spread  beyond  the  walls  of  single 
towns  ;  it  was  hemmed  in  on  all  sides  by  feudal  and 
ecclesiastical  institutions,  which  restrained  it  within 
definite  limits.  The  free  towns  of  Germany  were 
mostly  dependent  upon  their  bishops  or  archbishops  ; 
the  more  politically  important  cities  of  Flanders  were 
under  the  suzerainty  of  a  feudal  family  ;  they  were 
subject  to  constant  vexations  from    their   suzerains. 


32  EUPHORION. 

and  their  very  existence  was  endangered  by  an 
attempt  at  independence  ;  Liege  was  well-nigh  de- 
stroyed by  the  supporters  of  her  bishop,  and  Ghent 
was  ruined  by  the  revenge  of  the  Duke  of  Burgundy. 
In  these  northern  cities,  therefore,  the  commonwealth 
was  restricted  to  a  sort  of  mercantile  corporation, 
powerful  within  the  town,  but  powerless  without  it ; 
while  outside  the  town  reigned  feudalism,  with  its 
robber  nobles,  free  companies,  and  bands  of  outlawed 
peasants,  from  whom  the  merchant  princes  of  Bruges 
and  Niirnberg  could  scarcely  protect  their  wares.  To 
this  political  feebleness  and  narrowness  corresponded 
an  intellectual  weakness  and  pettiness  :  the  burghers 
were  mere  self-ruling  tradesfolk  ;  their  interests  did 
not  extend  far  beyond  their  shops  and  their  houses  ; 
literature  was  cramped  in  guilds,  and  reflection  and 
imagination  were  confined  within  the  narrow  limits  of 
town  life.  Everything  was  on  a  small  scale ;  the 
Renaissance  was  moderate  and  inefficient,  running 
no  great  dangers  and  achieving  no  great  conquests. 
There  was  not  enough  action  to  produce  reaction  ; 
and,  while  the  Italian  free  States  were  ground  down 
by  foreign  tyrannies,  the  German  and  Flemish  cities 
insensibly  merged  into  the  vast  empire  of  the  House 
of  Austria.  While  also  the  Italians  of  the  sixteenth 
century  rushed  into  moral  and  religious  confusion, 
which  only  Jesuitism  could  discipline,  the  Germans  of 
the  same  time  quietly  and  comfortably  adopted  the 
Reformation. 


THE  SACRIFICE.  33 

The  main  cause  of  this  difference,  the  main  explan- 
ation of  the  fact  that  while  in  the  North  the  Renais- 
sance was  cramped  and  enfeebled,  in  Italy  it  carried 
everything  before  it,  lies  in  the  circumstance  that 
feudalism  never  took  deep  root  in  Italy.  The  con- 
quered Latin  race  was  enfeebled,  it  is  true,  but  it  was 
far  more  civilized  than  the  conqueringTeutonic  peoples  ; 
the  Barbarians  came  down,  not  on  to  a  previous  layer 
of  Barbarians,  but  on  to  a  deep  layer  of  civilized  men  ; 
the  nomads  of  the  North  found  in  Italy  a  people 
weakened  and  corrupt,  but  with  a  long  and  inextin- 
guishable habit  of  independence,  of  order,  of  industry. 
The  country  had  been  cultivated  for  centuries,  the 
Barbarians  could  not  turn  it  into  a  desert ;  the  inhabi- 
tants had  been  organized  as  citizens  for  a  thousand 
years,  the  Barbarians  could  not  reorganize  them  feudally. 
The  Barbarians  who  settled  in  Italy,  especially  the 
latest  of  them,  the  Lombards,  were  not  only  in  a 
minority,  but  at  an  immense  disadvantage.  They 
founded  kingdoms  and  dukedoms,  where  German  was 
spoken  and  German  laws  were  enacted ;  but  whenever 
they  tried  to  communicate  with  their  Italian  subjects, 
they  found  themselves  forced  to  adopt  the  Latin  lan- 
guage, manners,  and  laws ;  their  domination  became 
real  only  in  proportion  as  it  ceased  to  be  Teutonic, 
and  the  Barbarian  element  was  swallowed  up  by  what 
remained  of  Roman  civilization.  Little  by  little  these 
Lombard  monarchies,  without  roots  in  the  soil,  and 
surrounded  by  hostile  influences,  died  out,  and  there 

4 


34  EUPHORION. 

remained  of  the  invaders  only  a  certain  number  of 
nobles,  those  whose  descendants  were  to  bear  the 
originally  German  names  of  Gherardesca,  Rolandinghi, 
Soffredinghi,  Lambertazzi,  Guidi,  and  whose  suzerains 
were  the  Bavarian  and  Swabian  dukes  and  marquises 
of  Tuscany.  Meanwhile  the  Latin  element  revived  ; 
towns  were  rebuilt  ;  a  new  Latin  language  was  formed  ; 
and  the  burghers  of  these  young  communities  gradually 
wrested  franchises  and  privileges  from  the  weak  Teu- 
tonic rulers,  who  required  Italian  agriculture,  industry, 
and  commerce,  without  which  they  and  their  feudal 
retainers  would  have  starved.  Feudalism  became 
speedily  limited  to  the  hilly  country  ;  the  plain 
became  the  property  of  the  cities  which  it  surrounded  ; 
the  nobles  turned  into  mere  robber  chieftains,  then  into 
mercenary  soldiers,  and  finally,  as  the  towns  gained 
importance,  they  gradually  descended  into  the  cities 
and  begged  admission  into  the  guilds  of  artizans  and 
tradesfolk.  Thus  they  grew  into  citizens  and  Italians  ; 
but  for  a  long  time  they  kept  hankering  after  feudalism, 
and  looking  towards  the  German  emperors  who 
claimed  the  inheritance  of  the  Lombard  kings.  The 
struggle  between  Guelphs  and  Ghibellines,  between 
the  German  feudal  element  and  the  Latin  civic  one, 
ended  in  the  complete  annihilation  of  the  former  in 
all  the  north  and  centre  of  Italy,  The  nobles  sank 
definitely  into  merchants,  and  those  who  persisted  in 
keeping  their  castles  were  speedily  ousted  by  the 
commissaries  of  the  free  towns.     Such  is  the  history 


THE  SACRIFICE.  35 

of  feudalism  in  Italy — the  history  of  Barbarian  minority 
engulphed  in  Latin  civilization  ;  of  Teutonic  counts 
and  dukes  turned  into  robber  nobles,  hunted  into  the 
hills  by  the  townsfolk,  and  finally  seeking  admission 
into  the  guilds  of  wool-spinners  or  money-changers  ; 
and  in  it  is  the  main  explanation  of  the  fact  that  the 
Italian  republics,  instead  of  remaining  restricted  within 
their  city  walls  like  those  of  the  North,  spread  over 
whole  provinces,  and  became  real  politically  organized 
States.  And  in  such  States  having  a  free  political, 
military, and  commercial  life,  uncramped  by  ecclesiastic 
or  feudal  influence,  in  them  alone  could  the  great 
revival  of  human  intelligence  and  character  thoroughly 
succeed.  The  commune  was  the  only  species  of  free 
government  possible  during  the  Middle  Ages,  the  only 
form  which  could  resist  that  utterly  prostrating  action 
of  later  mediaevalism.  Feudalism  stamped  out  civili- 
zation ;  monasticism  warped  it  ;  in  the  open  country 
it  was  burnt,  trampled  on,  and  uprooted  ;  in  the  cloister 
it  withered  and  shrank  and  perished  ;  only  within  the 
walls  of  a  city,  protected  from  the  storm  without,  and 
yet  in  the  fresh  atmosphere  of  life,  could  it  develope, 
flourish,  and  bear  fruit. 

But  this  system  of  the  free  town  contained  in  itself, 
as  does  every  other  institution,  the  seed  of  death — 
contained  it  in  that  expandingelement  which developes, 
ripens,  rots,  and  finally  dissolves  all  living  organisms. 
A  little  town  is  formed  in  the  midst  of  some  feudal 
state,  as  Pisa,    Florence,  Lucca,  and  Bologna   were 


36  EUPHORION. 

formed  in  the  dominions  of  the  lords  of  Tuscany ; 
the  elders  govern  it ;  it  is  protected  from  without ;  it 
obtains  privileges  from  its  suzerain,  always  glad  to 
oppose  anything  to  his  vassals,  and  who,  unlike  them, 
is  too  far  removed  in  the  feudal  scale  to  injure  the 
commune,  which  is  under  his  supreme  jurisdiction  but 
not  in  his  land.  The  town  can  thus  develope  regu- 
larly, governing  itself,  taxing  itself,  defending  itself 
against  encroaching  neighbours  ;  it  gradually  extends 
beyond  its  own  walls,  liberates  its  peasantry,  extends 
its  commerce,  extinguishes  feudalism,  beats  back  its 
suzerain  or  buys  privileges  from  him  ;  in  short,  lives 
the  vigorous  young  life  of  the  early  Italian  common- 
wealths. But  now  the  danger  begins.  The  original 
system  of  government,  where  every  head  of  a  family 
is  a  power  in  the  State,  where  every  man  helps  to 
govern,  without  representation  or  substitution,  could 
exist  only  as  long  as  the  commune  remained  small 
enough  for  the  individual  to  be  in  proportion  with  it ; 
as  long  as  the  State  remained  small  enough  for  all  its 
citizens  to  assemble  in  the  market-place  and  vote, 
for  every  man  to  know  every  detail  of  the  admin- 
istration, every  inch  of  the  land.  When  the  limits 
were  extended,  the  burgher  had  to  deal  with  towns 
and  villages  and  men  and  things  which  he  did  not 
know,  and  which  he  probably  hated,  as  every  small 
community  hated  its  neighbour  ;  witness  the  horrible 
war,  lasting  centuries,  between  the  two  little  towns  of 
Dinanc  and  Bouvines  on  the  Meuse.     Still  more  was 


THE  SACRIFICE.  37 

this  the  case  with  an  important  city  :  the  subjugated 
town  was  hated  all  the  more  for  being  a  rival  centre  ; 
the  burghers  of  Florence,  inspired  only  by  their  narrow 
town  interest,  treated  Pisa  according  to  its  dictates, 
that  is,  tried  to  stamp  it  out.  Thence  the  victorious 
communes  came  to  be  surrounded  by  conquered  com- 
munes, which  they  dared  not  trust  with  any  degree  of 
power  ;  and  which,  instead  of  being  so  many  allies  in 
case  of  invasion,  were  merely  focuses  of  revolt,  or  at 
best  inert  impediments.  Similarly,  when  the  com- 
munes enlarged,  and  found  it  indispensable  to  delegate 
special  men,  who  could  attend  to  political  matters  more 
thoroughly  than  the  other  citizens,  they  were  constantly 
falling  under  the  tyranny  of  \h.€\x  captams  of  the  people, 
oi  then-  gonfalo}iieri,  and  of  all  other  heads  of  the  State; 
or  else,  as  in  Florence,  they  were  frightened  by  this 
continual  danger  into  a  system  of  perpetual  interfer- 
ence with  the  executive,  which  was  thus  rendered  well- 
nigh  helpless.  To  this  rule  Venice  forms  the  only 
exception,  on  account  of  her  exceptional  position  and 
history  :  the  earliest  burghers  turning  into  an  intensely 
conservative  and  civic  aristocracy,  while  everywhere 
else  the  feudal  nobles  turned  into  petty  burghers,  en- 
tirely subversive  of  communal  interests.  Venice  had 
the  yet  greater  safeguard  of  being  protected  both  from 
her  victorious  enemies  and  her  own  victorious  generals; 
who,  however  powerful  on  the  mainland,  could  not 
seriously  endanger  the  city  itself,  which  thus  remained 
a  centre  of  reorganization  in  time  of  disaster.     In  this 


38  EUPHORION, 

Venice  was  entirely  unique,  as  she  was  unique  in  the 
duration  of  her  institutions  and  independence.  In  the 
other  towns  of  Italy,  where  there  existed  no  naturally 
governing  family  or  class,  where  every  citizen  had  an 
equal  share  in  government,  and  there  existed  no  dis- 
tinction save  that  of  wealth  and  influence,  there  was  a 
constant  tendency  to  the  illegitimate  preponderance 
of  every  man  or  every  family  that  rose  above  the  aver- 
age ;  and  in  a  democratic,  mercantile  State,  not  a  day 
passed  without  some  such  elevation.  In  a  systematic, 
consolidated  State,  where  the  power  is  in  the  hands  of 
a  hereditary  sovereign  or  aristocracy,  a  rich  merchant 
remains  a  rich  merchant,  a  victorious  general  remains 
a  victorious  general,  an  eloquent  orator  remains  an 
eloquent  orator ;  but  in  a  shapeless,  flunctuating 
democracy  like  those  of  Italy,  the  man  who  has  in- 
fluence over  his  fellow-citizens,  whether  by  his  money, 
his  soldiers,  or  his  eloquence,  necessarily  becomes  the 
head  of  the  State  ;  everything  is  free  and  unoccupied, 
only  a  little  superior  strength  is  required  to  push  into 
it.  Cosimo  de'  Medici  has  many  clients,  many  cor- 
respondents, many  debtors  ;  he  can  bind  people  by 
pecuniary  obligations:  he  becomes  prince.  Sforza 
has  a  victorious  army,  whom  he  can  either  hound  on 
to  the  city  or  restrain  into  a  protection  of  its  interests : 
he  becomes  prince.  Savonarola  has  eloquence  that 
makes  the  virtuous  start  up  and  the  wicked  tremble  : 
he  becomes  prince.  The  history  of  the  Italian  com- 
monwealths shows  us  but  one  thing  :  the  people,  the 


THE  SACRIFICE.  39 

only  legal  possessors  of  political  power,  giving  it  over 
to  their  bankers  (Medici,  Pepoli)  ;  to  their  generals 
(Delia  Torre,  Visconti,  Scaligeri)  ;  to  their  monkish 
reformers  (Fra  Bussolaro,  Fra  Giovanni  da  Vincenza, 
Savonarola).  Here  then  we  have  the  occasional  but 
inevitable  usurpers,  who  either  momentarily  or  finally 
disorganize  the  State.  But  this  is  not  all.  In  such 
a  State  every  family  hate,  every  mercantile  hostility, 
means  a  corresponding  political  division.  The  guilds 
are  sure  to  be  rivals,  the  larger  wishing  to  exclude  the 
smaller  from  government :  the  lower  working  classes 
(the  ciompi  of  Florence)  wish  to  upset  the  guilds  com- 
pletely ;  the  once  feudal  nobles  wish  to  get  back  mili- 
tary power  ;  the  burghers  wish  entirely  to  extirpate 
the  feudal  nobles  ;  the  older  families  wish  to  limit  the 
Government,  the  newer  prefer  democracy  and  Csesarism. 
Add  to  this  the  complications  of  private  interests,  the 
personal  jealousies  and  aversions,  the  private  warfare, 
inevitable  in  a  town  where  legal  justice  is  not  always 
to  be  had,  while  forcible  retaliation  is  always  within 
reach  ;  and  the  result  is  constant  party  spirit,  insults, 
scuffles,  conspiracies  :  the  feudal  nobles  build  towers 
in  the  streets,  the  burghers  pull  them  down  ;  the  lower 
artizans  set  fire  to  the  warehouses  of  the  guilds,  the 
magistrates  take  part  in  the  contest ;  blood  is  spilt, 
magistrates  are  beheaded  or  thrown  out  of  windows, 
a  foreign  State  is  entreated  to  interfere,  and  a  number 
of  citizens  are  banished  by  the  victorious  party.  This 
latter  result  creates  a  new  and  terrible  danger  for  the 


40  EUPHORION. 

State,  in  the  persons  of  so  many  exiles,  ready  to  do 
anything,  to  join  with  any  one,  in  order  to  return  to  the 
city  and  drive  out  their  enemies  in  their  turn.  The  end 
of  such  constant  upheavings  is  that  the  whole  popula- 
tion is  disarmed,  no  party  suffering  its  rival  to  have  any 
means  of  offence  or  defence.  Moreover,  as  industry  and 
commerce  develope,  the  citizens  become  unwilling  to 
fight,  while  on  the  other  hand  the  invention  of  firearms, 
subverting  the  whole  system  of  warfare,  renders  special 
military  training  more  and  more  necessary.  In  the 
days  of  the  Lombard  League,  of  Campaldino  and 
Montaperti,  the  citizens  could  fight,  hand  to  hand, 
round  their  car-roccio  or  banner,  without  much  disci- 
pline being  required  ;  but  when  it  came  to  fortifying 
towns  against  cannon,  to  drilling  bodies  of  heavily 
armed  cavalry,  acting  by  the  mere  dexterity  of  their 
movements  ;  when  war  became  a  science  and  an  art, 
then  the  citizen  had  necessarily  to  be  left  out,  and 
adventurers  and  poor  nobles  had  to  form  armies  of 
mercenaries,  making  warfare  their  sole  profession. 
This  system  of  mercenary  troops,  so  bitterl}-  inveighed 
against  by  Machiavelli  (who,  of  course,  entirely  over- 
looked its  inevitable  origin  and  viewed  it  as  a  volun- 
tarily incurred  pest),  added  yet  another  and,  perhaps, 
the  very  worst  danger  to  civil  liberty.  It  gave  enor- 
mous, irresistible  power  to  adventurers  unscrupulous 
by  nature  and  lawless  by  education,  the  sole  object  of 
whose  career  it  became  to  obtain  possession  of  States  ; 
by  no   means  a  difficult  enterprise,  considering  that 


THE  SACRIFICE.  41 

they  and  their  fellows  were  the  sole  possessors  of 
military  force  in  the  country.  At  the  same  time,  this 
system  of  mercenaries  perfected  the  condition  of  utter 
defencelessness  in  which  the  gradual  subjection  of 
rival  cities,  the  violent  party  spirit,  and  the  general 
disarming  of  the  burghers,  had  placed  the  great  Italian 
cities.  For  these  troops,  being  wholly  indifferent  as 
to  the  cause  for  which  they  were  fighting,  turned  war 
into  the  merest  game  of  dodges — half-a-dozen  men 
being  killed  at  a  great  battle  like  that  of  Anghiari 
— and  they  at  the  same  time  protracted  campaigns 
beyond  every  limit,  without  any  decisive  action  taking 
place.  The  result  of  all  these  inevitable  causes  of  ruin, 
was  that  most  of  the  commonwealths  fell  into  the 
hands  of  despots  ;  while  those  that  did  not  were  para- 
lyzed by  interior  factions,  by  a  number  of  rebellious 
subject  towns,  and  by  generals  who,  even  if  they  did 
not  absolutely  betray  their  employers,  never  efficiently 
served  them. 

Such  a  condition  of  civic  disorder  lasted  through- 
out the  Middle  Ages,  until  the  end  of  the  fifteenth 
century,  without  any  further  evils  arising  from  it. 
The  Italians  made  endless  wars  with  each  other, 
conquered  each  other,  changed  their  government 
without  end,  fell  into  the  power  of  tyrants ;  but 
throughout  these  changes  their  civilization  developed 
unimpeded  ;  because,  although  one  of  the  centres  of 
national  life  might  be  momentarily  crushed,  the  others 
remained  in  activity,  and    infused  vitality  even  into 


42  EUPHORION. 

the  feeble  one,  which  would  otherwise  have  perished. 
All  these  ups  and  downs  seemed  but  to  stir  the  life 
in  the  country :  and  no  vital  danger  appeared  to 
threaten  it ;  nor  did  any,  so  long  as  the  surrounding 
countries — France,  Germany,  and  Spain — remained 
mere  vast  feudal  nebulae,  formless,  weightless,  im- 
movable. The  Italians  feared  nothing  from  them  ; 
they  would  call  down  the  King  of  France  or  the 
Emperor  of  Germany  without  a  moment's  hesitation, 
because  they  knew  that  the  king  could  not  bring 
France,  nor  the  emperor  bring  Germany,  but  only  a 
few  miserable,  hungry  retainers  with  him ;  but  Florence 
would  watch  the  growth  of  the  petty  State  of  the 
Scaligers,  and  Venice  look  with  terror  at  the  Duke  of 
Milan,  because  they  knew  that  tJiejx  there  was  con- 
centrated life,  and  an  organization  which  could  be 
wielded  as  perfectly  as  a  sword  by  the  head  of  the 
State.  In  the  last  decade  of  the  fifteenth  century 
the  Italians  called  in  the  French  to  put  down  their 
private  enemies :  Lodovico  of  Milan  called  down 
Charles  VIII.  to  rid  him  of  his  nephew  and  of  the 
Venetians  ;  the  Venetians  to  rid  them  of  Lodovico : 
the  Medici  to  establish  them  firmly  in  Florence  ;  the 
party  of  freedom  to  drive  out  the  Medici.  Each  State 
intended  to  use  the  French  to  serve  their  purpose,  and 
then  to  send  back  Charles  VIII.  with  a  little  money 
and  a  great  deal  of  derision,  as  they  had  done  with 
kings  and  emperors  of  earlier  days.  But  Italian  poli- 
ticians suddenly  discovered  that    they  had    made   a 


THE  SACRIFICE.  43 

fatal  mistake ;  that  they  had  reckoned  in  ignorance, 
and  that  instead  of  an  army  they  had  called  down  a 
nation  :  for  during  the  interval  since  their  last  appeal 
to  foreign  interference,  that  great  movement  had 
taken  place  which  had  consolidated  the  heteroge- 
neous feudal  nebulae  into  homogeneous  and  compact 
kingdoms. 

Single  small  States,  relying  upon  mercenary  troops, 
could  not  for  a  moment  resist  the  shock  of  such 
an  agglomeration  of  soldiery  as  that  of  the  French, 
and  of  their  successors  the  Spaniards  and  Germans. 
Sismondi  asks  indignantly.  Why  did  the  Italians  not 
form  a  federation  as  soon  as  the  strangers  appeared  ? 
He  might  as  well  ask,  Why  did  the  commonwealths 
not  turn  into  a  modern  monarchy  ?  The  habit  of 
security  from  abroad  and  of  jealousy  within ;  the 
essential  nature  of  a  number  of  rival  trading  centres, 
made  such  a  thing  not  only  impossible  of  execution, 
but  for  a  while  impossible  of  conception  ;  confedera- 
cies had  become  possible  only  when  Burlamacchi  was 
decapitated  by  the  imperialists ;  popular  resistance 
had  become  a  reality  only  when  Feruccio  was  mas- 
sacred by  the  Spaniards  ;  a  change  of  national  insti- 
tutions was  feasible  only  when  all  national  institutions 
had  been  destroyed  ;  when  the  Italians,  having  recog- 
nized the  irresistible  force  of  their  adversaries,  had 
ceased  to  form  independent  States  and  larger  and 
smaller  guilds  ;  when  all  the  characteristics  of  Italian 
civilization  had  been  destroyed  ;  when,  in  short,  it  was 


44  E  UP  HO  R  ION. 

too  late  to  do  anything  save  theorize  with  Machiavelli 
and  Guicciardini  as  to  what  ought  to  have  been  done. 
We  must  not  hastily  accuse  the  volition  of  the  Italians 
of  the  Renaissance  ;  they  may  have  been  egotistic  and 
timid,  but  had  they  been  fas  some  most  certainly 
were)  heroic  and  self-sacrificing  to  the  utmost  degree, 
they  could  not  have  averted  the  catastrophe.  The 
nature  of  their  civilization  prevented  not  only  their 
averting  the  peril,  but  even  their  conceiving  its  exist- 
ence ;  the  very  nature  of  their  political  forms  necessi- 
tated such  a  dissolution  of  them.  The  commune 
grows  from  within  ;  it  is  a  little  speck  which  gradually 
extends  its  circumference,  and  the  further  this  may  be 
from  the  original  centre,  the  less  do  its  parts  coalesce. 
The  modern  monarchy  grows  from  external  pressure, 
and  towards  the  centre  ;  it  is  a  huge  mass  consoli- 
dating into  a  hard,  distinct  shape.  Thence  it  follows 
that  the  more  the  commonwealth  developes,  the 
weaker  it  grows,  because  its  tendency  is  to  spread 
and  fall  to  pieces  ;  whereas  the  more  the  monarchy 
developes,  the  stronger  it  becomes,  because  it  fills  up 
towards  the  centre,  and  becomes  more  vigorously 
knit  together.  The  city  ceases  to  be  a  city  when 
extended  over  hundreds  of  miles  ;  the  nation  becomes 
all  the  more  a  nation  for  being  compressed  towards  a 
central  point. 

The  entire  political  collapse  of  Italy  in  the  sixteenth 
century  was  not  only  inevitable,  from  the  essential 
nature  of  the  civilization  of  the  Renaissance,  but  it 


THE  SACRIFICE.  45 

was  also  indispensable  in  order  that  this  civilization 
might  fulfil  its  mission.  Civilization  cannot  spread 
so  long  as  it  is  contained  within  a  national  mould, 
and  only  a  vanquished  nation  can  civilize  its  victors. 
The  Greece  of  Pericles  could  not  Hellenize  Rome, 
but  the  Greece  of  the  weak  successors  of  Alexander 
could  ;  the  Rome  of  Caesar  did  not  Romanize  the 
Teutonic  races  as  did  the  Rome  of  Theodosius  ;  no 
amount  of  colonizing  among  the  vanquished  can  ever 
produce  the  effect  of  a  victorious  army,  of  a  whole 
nation,  suddenly  finding  itself  in  the  midst  of  the 
superior  civilization  of  a  conquered  people.  Michelet 
may  well  call  the  campaign  of  Charles  VIII.  the  dis- 
covery of  Italy.  His  imaginative  mind  seized  at  once 
the  vast  importance  of  this  descent  of  the  French  into 
Italy,  which  other  historians  have  been  too  prone 
to  view  in  the  same  light  as  any  other  invasion.  It 
is  from  this  moment  that  dates  the  modernisation, 
if  we  may  so  express  ourselves,  of  the  North.  The 
barbarous  soldiers  of  Gaston  de  Foix,  of  Frundsberg, 
and  of  Gonsalvo,  were  the  unconscious  bearers  of  the 
seeds  of  the  ages  of  Elizabeth,  of  Louis  XIV.,  and  of 
Goethe.  These  stupid  and  rapacious  ruffians,  while 
they  wantonly  destroyed  the  works  of  Italian  civili- 
zation, rendered  possible  the  existence  of  a  Montaigne, 
a  Shakespeare,  and  a  Cervantes. 

Italy  was  as  a  vast  storehouse,  sheltered  from  all  the 
dangers  of  mediaeval  destruction  ;  in  which,  while  all 
other  nations  were  blindl}'  and  fiercely  \\orking  out 


46  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

their  national  existence,  the  inheritance  of  Antiquity 
and  the  produce  of  the  earliest  modern  civilization 
had  been  peaceably  garnered  up.  When  the  store- 
house was  full,  its  gates  had  to  be  torn  open  and  its 
riches  plundered  and  disseminated  by  the  intellectual 
starvelings  of  the  North  ;  thus  only  could  the  rest  of 
mankind  feed  on  these  riches,  regain  and  develope 
their  mental  life. 

What  were  those  intellectual  riches  of  the  Renais- 
sance ?  What  was  that  strong  intellectual  food  which 
revived  the  energies  and  enriched  the  blood  of  the 
Barbarians  of  the  sixteenth  century  ?  The  Renais- 
sance possessed  the  germs  of  every  modern  thing,  and 
much  that  was  far  more  than  a  mere  germ :  it  possessed 
the  habit  of  equality  before  the  law,  of  civic  organiza- 
tion, of  industry  and  commerce  developed  to  immense 
and  superb  proportions.  It  possessed  science,  literature, 
and  art  ;  above  all,  that  which  at  once  produced 
and  was  produced  by  all  these — thorough  perception 
of  what  exists,  thorough  consciousness  of  our  own 
freedom  and  powers  :  self-cognizance.  In  Italy  there 
was  intellectual  light,  enabling  men  to  see  and 
judge  all  around  them,  enabling  them  to  act  wit- 
tingly and  deliberately.  In  this  lies  the  immense 
greatness  of  the  Renaissance  ;  to  this  are  due  all  its 
achievements  in  literature  and  science,  and,  above  all, 
in  art :  that,  for  the  first  time  since  the  dissolution  of 
antique  civilization,  men  were  free  agents,  both  in 
thought  and  in  deed  ;  that  there  was  an  end  of  that 


THE  SACRIFICE.  AT 

palsying  slavery  of  the  Middle  Ages,  slavery  of  body 
and  of  mind,  slavery  to  stultified  ideas  and  effete 
forms,  which  made  men  endure  every  degree  of  evil 
and  believe  every  degree  of  absurdity.  For  the  first 
time  since  Antiquity,  man  walks  free  of  all  political 
and  intellectual  trammels,  erect,  conscious  of  his  own 
thoughts,  master  of  his  own  actions  ;  ready  to  seek 
for  truth  across  the  ocean  like  Columbus,  or  across  the 
heavens  like  Copernicus ;  to  seek  it  in  criticism  and 
analysis  like  Machiavelli  or  Guicciardini,  boldly  to 
reproduce  it  in  its  highest,  widest  sense  like  Michael 
Angelo  and  Raphael. 

The  men  of  the  Renaissance  had  to  pay  a  heavy 
price  for  this  intellectual  freedom  and  self-cognizance 
which  they  not  only  enjoyed  themselves,  but  trans- 
mitted to  the  rest  of  the  world  ;  the  price  was  the  loss 
of  all  moral  standard,  of  all  fixed  public  feeling.  They 
had  thrown  aside  all  accepted  rules  and  criteria,  they 
had  cast  away  all  faith  in  traditional  institutions,  they 
had  destroyed,  and  could  not  yet  rebuild.  In  their 
instinctive  and  universal  disbelief  in  all  that  had  been 
taught  them,  they  lost  all  respect  for  opinion,  for  rule, 
for  what  had  been  called  right  and  wrong.  Could  it 
be  otherwise  .''  Had  they  not  discovered  that  what 
had  been  called  right  had  often  been  unnatural,  and 
what  had  been  called  wrong  often  natural .''  Moral 
teachings,  remonstrances,  and  judgments  belonged  to 
that  dogmatism  from  which  they  had  broken  loose  ; 
to  those  schools  and  churches  where  the  foolish  and 


48  EUPHORION. 

the  unnatural  had  been  taught  and  worshipped  ;   to 
those  priests  and  monks  who  themselves  most  shame- 
fully violated  their   teachings.     To  profess  morality 
was  to  be  a  hypocrite ;  to  reprobate  others  was  to  be 
narrow-minded.     There  was  so  much  error  mixed  up 
with  truth  that  truth  had  to  share  the  discredit  of  error  ; 
so  many  innocent  things  had  been  denounced  as  sins 
that  sinful  ones  at  length  ceased  to  be  reprobated  ; 
people  had  so  often  found  themselves  sympathizing 
with   supposed    criminals,  that    they  soon  lost   their 
horror  of  real  ones.     Damnation  came  to  be  disasso- 
ciated from  moral  indignation  :  it  was  the  retribution, 
not  of  the  unnatural  and  immoral,  but  of  the  unlawful  ; 
and    unlawful    with  respect   to  a  law  made  without 
reference    to    reason    and    instinct.     As   reason    and 
instinct  were  thus  set  at  defiance,  but  could  not  be 
silenced,  the  law  was  soon  acquiesced  in  without  being 
morally  supported  ;  thus,  little  by  little,  moral  feeling 
became  warped.     This  was  already  the  case  in  Dante's 
day.     Farinata    is    condemned  to  the  most    horrible 
punishment,  which  to  Dante  seems  just,  because  in 
accordance  with  an  accepted  code  ;  yet  Dante  cannot 
but  admire  him  and  cannot  really  hate  him,  for  there 
is  nothing  in  him  to  hate  ;  he  is  a  criminal  and  yet 
respected — fatal  combination  !     Dante  punishes  Fran- 
cesca.  Pier  delle  Vigne,  and  Brunetto  Latini,  but  he 
shows  no  personal  horror  of  them  ;  in  the  one  case 
his  moral  instinct  refrains  from  censuring  the  com- 
paratively innocent,  in    the  other   it    has    ceased    to 


THE  SACRIFICE.  49 

revolt  from  the  really  infamous.  Where  Dante  does 
feel  real  indignation,  is  most  often  in  cases  unpro- 
vided for  by  the  religious  codes,  as  with  those  low, 
grovelling,  timid  natures  (the  very  same  with  whom 
Machiavelli,  the  admirer  of  great  villains,  fairly  loses 
patience),  those  creatures  whom  Dante  personally 
despises,  whom  he  punishes  with  filthy  devices  of  his 
own,  whom  he  passes  by  with  words  such  as  he  never 
addresses  to  Semiramis,  Brutus,  or  Capaneus.  This 
toleration  of  vice,  while  acquiescing  in  its  legal  pun- 
ishment, increased  in  proportion  to  the  development 
of  individual  judgment,  and  did  not  cease  till  all  the 
theories  of  the  lawful  and  unlawful  had  been  so  com- 
pletely demolished  as  to  permit  of  their  being  rebuilt 
on  solid  bases. 

This  work  of  demolition  had  not  yet  ceased  in  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century  ;  and  the  moral 
confusion  due  to  it  was  increased  by  various  causes 
dependent  on  political  and  other  circumstances.  The 
despots  in  whose  hands  it  was  the  inevitable  fate  of 
the  various  commonwealths  to  fall,  were  by  their  very 
position  immoral  in  all  their  dealings  :  violent,  fraudu- 
lent, suspicious,  and,  from  their  life  of  constant  un- 
natural tension  of  the  feelings,  prone  to  every  species 
of  depravity  ;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  in  the  feudal 
parts  of  Italy — which  had  merely  received  a  superficial 
Renaissance  varnish  imported  from  other  places  with 
painters  and  humanists — in  Naples,  Rome,  and  the 
greater  part  of  Umbria  and  the  Marches,  the  upper 

5 


50  EUPHORION. 

classes  had  got  into  that  monstrous  condition  which 
seems  to  have  been  the  inevitable  final  product  of 
feudalism,  and  which,  while  it  gave  France  her 
Armagnacs,  her  Foix,  and  her  Retz,  gave  Italy  their 
counterparts  in  her  hideously  depraved  princelets,  the 
Malatestas,  Varanos,  Vitelli,  and  Baglioni.  Both  these 
classes  of  men,  despots  and  feudal  nobles,  had  a  wide 
field  for  their  ambition  among  the  necessarily  dissolved 
civic  institutions  ;  and  their  easy  success  contributed 
to  confirm  the  general  tendency  of  the  day  to  say  with 
Commines,  "  Qui  a  le  succes  a  I'honneur,"  and  to 
confound  these  two  words  and  ideas.  Nor  was  this 
yet  all :  the  men  of  the  Renaissance  discovered  the 
antique  world,  and  in  their  wild,  blind  enthusiasm,  in 
their  ardent,  insatiable  thirst  for  its  literature,  swal- 
lowed it  eagerly,  dregs  and  all,  till  they  were  drunk 
and  poisoned. 

These  are  the  main  causes  of  the  immorality  of  the 
Renaissance  :  first,  the  general  disbelief  in  all  accepted 
doctrines,  due  to  the  falseness  and  unnaturalness  of 
those  hitherto  prevalent  ;  secondly,  the  success  of  un- 
scrupulous talent  in  a  condition  of  political  disorder  ; 
thirdly,  the  wholesale  and  unjudging  enthusiasm  for 
all  that  remained  of  Antiquity,  good  or  bad.  These 
three  great  causes,  united  in  a  general  intellectual 
ebullition,  are  the  explanation  of  the  worst  feature  of 
the  Renaissance :  not  the  wickedness  of  numberless 
single  individuals,  but  the  universal  toleration  of  it  by 
the  people  at  large.     Men  like  Sigismondo  Malatesta, 


THE  SACRIFICE.  51 

Sixtus  IV.,  Alexander  VI.,  and  Caesar  Borgia  might 
be  passed  over  as  exceptions,  as  monstrous  aberra- 
tions which  cannot  affect  our  judgment  of  their  time 
and  nation  ;  but  the  general  indifference  towards 
their  vices  shown  by  their  contemporaries  and 
countrymen  is  a  conclusive  and  terrible  proof  of  the 
moral  chaos  of  the  Renaissance.  It  is  just  the 
presence  of  so  much  instinctive  simplicity  and  virtue, 
of  childlike  devotion  to  great  objects,  of  patriarchal 
simplicity  of  manners,  of  all  that  is  loveable  in  the 
books  of  men  like  Vespasiano  da  Bisticci  and  Leon 
Battista  Alberti ;  of  so  much  that  seems  like  the 
realization  of  the  idyllic  home  and  merchant  life  of 
Schiller's  "  Song  of  the  Bell,"  by  the  side  of  all  the 
hideous  lawlessness  and  vice  of  the  despots  and 
humanists  ;  that  makes  the  Renaissance  so  drearily 
painful  a  spectacle.  The  presence  of  the  good  does 
not  console  us  for  that  of  the  evil,  because  it  neither 
mitigates  nor  even  shrinks  from  it ;  we  merely  lose 
our  pleasure  in  the  good  nature  and  simplicity  of 
yEneas  Sylvius  when  we  see  his  cool  admiration  for 
a  man  of  fraud  and  violence  like  Sforza  ;  we  begin 
to  mistrust  the  purity  and  integrity  of  the  upright 
Guarino  da  Verona  when  we  hear  his  lenient  judg- 
ment of  the  infamous  Beccadelli ;  we  require  of  the 
virtuous  that  they  should  not  only  be  incapable  of 
vice,  but  abhorrent  of  it  ;  and  this  is  what  even  the 
best  men  of  the  Renaissance  rarely  were. 

Such  a  state  of  moral  chaos  there  has  constantly 


52  EUPHORION. 

been  when  an  old  effete  mode  of  thought  required 
to  be  destroyed.  Such  work  is  always  attended,  in 
greater  or  less  degree,  by  this  subversion  of  all  recog- 
nized authority,  this  indifference  to  evil,  this  bold 
tasting  of  the  forbidden.  In  the  eighteenth  century 
France  plays  the  same  part  that  was  played  in  the 
fifteenth  by  Italy  :  again  we  meet  the  rebellion  against 
all  that  has  been  consecrated  by  time  and  belief,  the 
toleration  of  evil,  the  praise  of  the  abominable,  in  the 
midst  of  the  search  for  the  good.  These  two  have 
been  the  great  fever  epochs  of  modern  history  ;  fev^er 
necessary  for  a  subsequent  steady  growth.  Both  gave 
back  truth  to  man,  and  man  to  nature,  at  the  expense 
of  temporary  moral  uncertainty  and  ruthless  de- 
struction. The  Renaissance  reinstated  the  individual 
in  his  human  dignity,  as  a  thinking,  feeling,  and 
acting  being  ;  the  Eighteenth  Century  reconstructed 
society  as  a  homogeneous  free  existence  ;  both  at  the 
expense  of  individual  degradation  and  social  disorder. 
Both  were  moments  of  ebullition  in  which  horrible 
things  rose  to  the  surface,  but  after  which  what  re- 
mained was  purer  than  it  had  ever  been  before. 
.  This  is  no  plea  for  the  immorality  of  the  Renais- 
sance :  evil  is  none  the  less  evil  for  being  inevitable 
and  necessar}'  ;  but  it  is  nevertheless  well  that  we 
should  understand  its  necessity.  It  certainly  is  a 
terrible  admission,  but  one  which  must  be  made,  that 
evil  is  part  of  the  mechanism  for  producing  good  ;  and 
had  the  arranc^ement  of  the  universe  been  entrusted 


THE  SACRIFICE.  53 

to  us,  benevolent  and  equitable  people  of  an  enlight- 
ened age,  there  would  doubtless  have  been  invented 
some  system  of  evolution  and  progression  differing 
from  the  one  which  includes  such  machinery  as  hurri- 
canes and  pestilences,  carnage  and  misery,  super- 
stition and  license.  Renaissance  and  Eighteenth 
Century.  But  unfortunately  Nature  was  organized  in 
a  less  charitable  and  intelligent  fashion  ;  and,  among 
other  evils  required  for  the  final  attainment  of  good, 
we  find  that  of  whole  generations  of  men  being  con- 
demned to  moral  uncertainty  and  error  in  order  that 
other  generations  may  enjoy  knowledge  peacefully 
and  guiltlessly.  Let  us  remember  this,  and  let  us  be 
more  generous  towards  the  men  who  were  wicked 
that  we  might  be  enlightened.  Above  all,  let  us  bear 
in  mind,  in  judging  the  Renaissance,  that  the  sacrifice 
which  it  represents  could  be  useful  only  in  so  far  as  it 
was  complete  and  irretrievable.  Let  us  remember  that 
the  communal  system  of  government,  on  whose  de- 
velopment the  Renaissance  mainly  depended,  inevi- 
tably perished  in  proportion  as  it  developed  ;  that  the 
absolute  subjugation  of  Italy  by  Barbarous  nations 
was  requisite  to  the  dissemination  of  the  civilization 
thus  obtained  ;  that  the  Italians  were  politically  an- 
nihilated before  they  had  time  to  recover  a  normal 
condition,  and  were  given  up  crushed  and  broken- 
spirited,  to  be  taught  righteousness  by  Spaniards  and 
Jesuits.  That,  in  short,  while  the  morality  of  the 
Italians  was  sacrificed  to  obtain    the  knowledre   on 


54  EUPHORION. 

which  modern  society  depends,  the  political  existence 
of  Italy  was  sacrificed  to  the  diffusion  of  that  know- 
ledge, and  that  the  nation  was  not  only  doomed  to 
immorality,  but  doomed  also  to  the  inability  to  reform. 
Perhaps,  if  we  think  of  all  this,  and  weigh  the  tre- 
mendous sacrifice  to  which  we  owe  our  present  intel- 
lectual advantages,  we  may  still  feel  sad,  but  sad 
rather  with  remorse  than  with  indignation,  in  contem- 
plating the  condition  of  Italy  in  the  first  years  of  the 
sixteenth  century  ;  in  looking  down  from  our  calm, 
safe,  scientific  position,  on  the  murder  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance :  great  and  noble  at  heart,  cut  off  pitilessly 
at  its  prime  ;  denied  even  an  hour  to  repent  and 
amend  ;  hurried  off  before  the  tribunal  of  posterity, 
suddenly,  unexpectedly,  and  still  bearing  its  weight 
of  unexpiated,  unrecognized  guilt. 


THE   ITALY  OF  THE  ELIZABETHAN 
DRAMATISTS. 


THE   ITALY  OF  THE 
ELIZABETHAN   DRAMATISTS. 


The  chroniclers  of  the  last  years  of  the  fifteenth 
century  have  recorded  how  the  soldiery  of  Charles 
VIII.  of  France  amused  the  tedious  leisure  of  their 
sullen  and  suspicious  occupation  of  Rome,  by  erecting 
in  the  camp  a  stage  of  planks,  and  performing  there- 
on a  rude  mystery-play.  The  play  thus  improvised 
by  a  handful  of  troopers  before  this  motley  invading 
army  :  before  the  feudal  cavalry  of  Burgundy,  strange 
steel  monsters,  half  bird,  half  reptile,  with  steel  beaked 
and  winged  helmets  and  claw-like  steel  shoes,  and 
jointed  steel  corselet  and  rustling  steel  mail  coat  ; 
before  the  infantry  of  Gascony,  rapid  and  rapacious 
with  tattered  doublets  and  rag-bound  feet ;  before  the 
over-fed,  immensely  plumed,  and  slashed  and  furbe- 
iowed  giants  of  Switzerland,  and  the  starved,  half- 
naked  savages  of  Brittany  and  the  Marches  ;  before 


58  EUPHORION. 

this  multifaced,  many-speeched  army,  gathered  from 
the  rich  cities  of  the  North  and  the  devastated  fields 
of  the  South,  and  the  wilds  and  rocks  of  the  West 
and  the  East,  alike  in  nothing  save  in  its  wonder 
and  dread  and  delight  and  horror  at  this  strange 
invaded  Italy — the  play  performed  for  the  entertain- 
ment of  this  encamped  army  was  no  ordinary  play. 
No  clerkly  allegorical  morality  ;  no  mouthing  and 
capering  market-place  farce  ;  no  history  of  Joseph 
and  his  Brethren,  of  the  Birth  of  the  Saviour,  or  of 
the  Temptation  of  St.  Anthony.  It  was  the  half- 
allegorical,  half-dramatic  representation  of  the  reigning 
Pope  Borgia  and  his  children  ;  it  was  the  rude  and 
hesitating  moulding  into  dramatic  shape  of  those 
terrible  rumours  of  simony  and  poison,  of  lust  and  of 
violence,  of  mysterious  death  and  abominable  love, 
which  had  met  the  invaders  as  they  had  first  set  their 
feet  in  Italy  ;  which  had  become  louder  and  clearer 
with  every  onward  step  through  the  peninsula,  and 
now  circulated  around  them,  with  frightful  distinct- 
ness, in  the  very  capital  of  Christ's  Vicar  on  Earth. 
This  blundering  mystery-play  of  the  French  troopers 
is  the  earliest  imaginative  fruit  of  that  first  terrified 
and  fascinated  glimpse  of  the  men  of  the  barbarous 
North  at  the  strange  Italy  of  the  Renaissance  ;  it  is 
the  first  manifestation  of  that  strong  tragic  impulse 
due  to  the  sudden  sight,  by  rude  and  imaginative 
young  nations,  of  the  splendid  and  triumphant  wicked- 
ness of  Italy. 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     59 

The  French  saw,  wondered,  shuddered,  and  played 
upon  their  camp  stage  the  tragedy  of  the  Borgias, 
But  the  French  remained  in  Italy,  became  familiar 
with  its  ways,  and  soon  merely  shrugged  their 
shoulders  and  smiled  where  they  had  once  stared 
in  horror.  They  served  under  the  flags  of  Sforzas, 
Borgias,  Baglionis,  and  Vitellis,  by  the  side  of  the 
bravos  of  Naples  and  Umbria  ;  they  saw  their  princes 
wed  the  daughters  of  evil-famed  Italian  sovereigns, 
and  their  princes'  children,  their  own  Valois  and 
Guises,  develope  into  puny,  ambiguous,  and  ominous 
Medicis  and  Gonzagas,  surrounded  by  Italian  min- 
ions and  poison  distillers,  and  buffoons  and  money- 
lenders. The  French  of  the  sixteenth  century,  during 
their  long  Neapolitan  and  Lombard  wars  and  nego- 
tiations, had  time  to  learn  all  that  Italy  could  teach  ; 
to  become  refined,  subtle,  indifferent,  and  cynical  : 
bastard  Italians,  with  the  bastard  Italian  art  of 
Goujon  and  Philibert  Delorme,  and  the  bastard 
Italian  poetry  of  Du  Bellay  and  Ronsard.  The 
French  of  the  sixteenth  century  therefore  translated 
Machiavel  and  Ariosto  and  Bandello  ;  but  they  never 
again  attempted  such  another  play  as  that  which  they 
had  improvised  while  listening  to  the  tales  of  Alex- 
ander VI.  and  Caesar  and  Lucrezia,  in  their  camp  in 
the  meadows  behind  Sant'  Angelo.  The  Spaniards 
then  came  to  Italy,  and  the  Germans  :  strong  mediaeval 
nations,  like  the  French,  with  the  creative  power  of 
the  Middle  Ages  still  in  them,  refreshed  by  the  long 


6o  EUPHORION. 

rest  of  the  dull  fifteenth  century.  But  Spaniards  and 
Germans  came  as  mere  greedy  and  besotten  and 
savage  mercenaries  :  the  scum  of  their  countries,  care- 
less of  Italian  sights  and  deeds,  thinking  only  of 
torturing  for  hidden  treasure,  or  swilling  southern 
wines ;  and  they  returned  to  Spain  and  to  Germany, 
to  persecutions  of  Moriscos  and  plundering  of  abbeys, 
as  savage  and  well-nigh  as  dull  as  they  had  arrived. 
A  smattering  of  Italian  literature,  art,  and  manners 
was  carried  back  to  Spain  and  Germany  by  Spanish 
and  German  princes  and  governors,  to  be  transmitted 
to  a  few  courtiers  and  hum.anists  ;  but  the  imagination 
of  the  lower  classes  of  Spain  and  of  Germany,  absorbed 
in  the  quixotic  Catholicism  of  Loyola  and  the  biblical 
contemplation  of  Luther,  never  came  into  fertilizing 
contact  with  the  decaying  Italy  of  the  Renaissance. 

The  mystery-play  of  the  soldiers  of  Charles  VIII. 
seemed  destined  to  remain  an  isolated  and  abortive 
attempt.  But  it  was  not  so.  The  invasions  had 
exhausted  themselves  ;  the  political  organization  of 
Italy  was  definitively  broken  up  ;  its  material  wealth 
was  exhausted  ;  the  French,  Germans,  and  Spaniards 
had  come  and  gone,  and  returned  and  gone  again  ; 
they  had  left  nothing  to  annex  or  to  pillage  ;  when, 
about  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  country 
began  to  be  overrun  by  a  new  horde  of  barbarians : 
the  English.  The  English  came  neither  as  invaders 
nor  as  marauders  ;  they  were  peaceable  students  and 
rich    noblemen,    who,    so    far   from    trying  to  extort 


THE  ITAL  Y  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.    6i 

money  or  annex  territory,  rather  profited  the  ruined 
Italians  by  the  work  which  they  did  and  the  money 
which  they  squandered.  Yet  these  quiet  and  profit- 
able travellers,  before  whom  the  Italians  might  safely 
display  their  remaining  wealth,  were  in  reality  as 
covetous  of  the  possessions  of  Italy  and  as  resolute  to 
return  home  enriched  as  any  tattered  Gascon  men- 
at-arms  or  gluttonous  Swiss  or  grinding  Spaniards. 
They  were,  one  and  all,  consciously  and  unconsciously, 
dragged  to  Italy  by  the  irresistible  instinct  that  Italy 
possessed  that  which  they  required  :  by  the  greed  of 
intellectual  gain.  That  which  they  thus  instinctively 
knew  that  Italy  possessed,  that  which  they  were  re- 
solved to  obtain,  was  a  mode  of  thought,  a  habit  of 
form  ;  philosophy,  art,  civilization  :  all  the  materials 
for  intellectual  manipulation.  For,  in  the  sixteenth 
century,  on  awakening  from  its  long  evil  sleep,  haunted 
by  civil  war  nightmiares  of  the  fifteenth  century,  the 
English  mind  had  started  up  in  the  vigour  of  well- 
nigh  mature  youth,  nourished  and  rested  by  the  long 
inactivity  in  which  it  had  slept  through  its  period  of 
assimilation  and  growth.  It  had  awakened  at  the 
first  touch  of  foreign  influence,  and  had  grown  with 
every  fresh  contact  with  the  outer  world  :  with  the 
first  glance  at  Plato  and  Xenophon  suddenly  opened 
by  Erasmus  and  Colet,  at  the  Bible  suddenly  opened 
by  Cranmer  ;  it  had  grown  with  its  sob  of  indignation 
at  the  sight  of  the  burning  faggots  surrounding  the 
martyrs,  with  its  joyous  heart-throbs  at  the  sight  of 


62  EUPHORION. 

the  seas  and  islands  of  the  New  World  ;  it  had  grown 
with  the  sudden  passionate  strain  of  every  nerve  and 
every  muscle  when  the  galleys  of  Philip  had  been 
sighted  in  the  Channel.  And  when  it  had  paused, 
taken  breath,  and  looked  calmly  around  it,  after  the 
tumult  of  all  these  sights  and  sounds  and  actions,  the 
English  mind,  in  the  time  of  Elizabeth,  had  found  itself 
of  a  sudden  full-grown  and  blossomed  out  into  superb 
manhood,  with  burning  activities  and  indefatigable 
powers.  But  it  had  found  itself  without  materials  for 
work.  Of  the  scholastic  philosophy  and  the  chivalric 
poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages  there  remained  but  little 
that  could  be  utilized  :  the  few  bungled  formulae,  the 
few  half-obsolete  rhymes  still  remaining,  were  as  unin- 
telligible, in  their  spirit  of  feudalism  and  monasticism 
and  mysticism,  as  were  the  Angevin  English  and  the 
monkish  Latin  in  which  they  were  written  to  these 
men  of  the  sixteenth  century.  All  the  intellectual 
wealth  of  England  remained  to  be  created  ;  but  it 
could  not  be  created  out  of  nothing.  Spenser,  Shake- 
speare, and  Bacon  could  not  be  produced  out  of  the 
half-  effete  and  scattered  fragments  of  Chaucer,  of 
Scotus,  and  of  Wycliffe.  The  materials  on  which 
English  genius  was  to  work  must  be  sought  abroad, 
and  abroad  they  could  be  found  only  in  Italy.  For 
in  the  demolished  Italy  of  the  sixteenth  century  lay 
the  whole  intellectual  wealth  of  the  world  :  the  great 
legacy  of  Antiquity,  the  great  work  of  the  Middle 
Ages   had    been   stored  up,  and  had  been  increased 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.    63 

threefold,  and  sorted  and  classified  by  the  Renais- 
sance ;  and  now  that  the  national  edifice  had  been 
dismantled  and  dilapidated,  and  the  national  activity- 
was  languishing,  it  all  lay  in  confusion,  awaiting  only 
the  hand  of  those  who  would  carry  it  away  and  use 
it  once  more.  To  Italy  therefore  Englishmen  of 
thought  and  fancy  were  dragged  by  an  impulse  of 
adventure  and  greed  as  irresistible  as  that  which 
dragged  to  Antwerp  and  the  Hanse  ports,  to  India 
and  America,  the  seekers  for  gold  and  for  soil.  To 
Italy  they  flocked  and  through  Italy  they  rambled, 
prying  greedily  into  each  cranny  and  mound  of  the 
half-broken  civilization,  upturning  with  avid  curiosity 
all  the  rubbish  and  filth  ;  seeking  with  aching  eyes 
and  itching  fingers  for  the  precious  fragments  of 
intellectual  splendour ;  lingering  with  fascinated 
glance  over  the  broken  remnants  and  deep,  myste- 
rious gulfs  of  a  crumbling  and  devastated  civilization. 
And  then,  impatient  of  their  intoxicating  and  tanta- 
lizing search,  suddenly  grown  desperate,  they  clutched 
and  stored  away  everything,  and  returned  home 
tattered,  soiled,  bedecked  with  gold  and  with  tinsel, 
laden  with  an  immense  uncouth  burden  of  jewels, 
and  broken  wealth,  and  refuse  and  ordure,  with 
pseudo-antique  philosophy,  with  half-mediaeval  Pe- 
trarchesque  poetry,  with  Renaissance  science,  with 
humanistic  pedantry  and  obscenity,  with  euphuistic 
conceits  and  casuistic  quibble,  with  art, 'politics, 
metaphysics — civilization    embedded    in   all    manner 


64  EUPHORION. 

of  rubbish  and  abomination,  soiled  with  all  manner 
of  ominous  stains.  All  this  did  they  carry  home 
and  throw  helter-skelter  into  the  new-kindled  fire 
of  English  intellectual  life,  mingling  with  it  many 
a  humble-seeming  Northern  alloy;  cleaning  and  com- 
pounding, casting  into  shapes,  mediaeval  and  English, 
this  strange  Corinthian  brass  made  of  all  these  hetero- 
geneous remnants,  classical,  Italian,  Saxon,  and  Chris- 
tian. A  strange  Corinthian  brass  indeed  ;  and  as 
various  in  tint,  in  weight,  and  in  tone,  in  manifold 
varieties  of  mixture,  as  were  the  moulds  into  which  it 
was  cast :  the  white  and  delicate  silver  settling  down 
in  the  gracious  poetic  moulds  of  Sidney  and  Spenser  ; 
the  glittering  gold,  which  can  buy  and  increase,  in 
the  splendid,  heavy  mould  of  Bacon's  prose  ;  and  the 
copper,  the  iron,  the  silver  and  gold  in  wondrous 
mixture,  with  wondrous  iridescences  of  colour  and 
wondrous  scale  of  tone,  all  poured  into  the  manifold 
moulds,  fantastic  and  beautiful  and  grand,  of  Shake- 
speare. And  as  long  as  all  this  dross  and  ore  and 
filth  brought  from  the  ruins  of  Italy  was  thus  min- 
gling in  the  heat  of  English  genius,  while  it  was  yet 
but  imperfectly  fused,  while  already  its  purest  and 
best  compounded  portion  was  being  expended  to 
make  Shakespeare,  and  when  already  there  remained 
only  a  seething  residue,  some  of  it  all,  of  the  pure 
metal  bubbling  up,  of  the  scum  frothing  round,  nay, 
of  the  very  used-up  dregs,  was  ever  and  anon  being 


THE  ITAL  Y  uf  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.    65 

ladled  out — gold,  dross,  filth,  all  indiscriminately — 
and  cast  into  shapes  severe,  graceful,  or  uncouth. 
And  this  somewhat,  thus  pilfered  from  what  was  to 
make,  or  was  making,  or  had  made,  the  works  of 
Shakespeare  ;  this  base  and  noble,  still  unfused  or 
already  exhausted  alloy,  became  the  strange  hetero- 
geneous works  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists ;  of 
Webster,  of  Ford,  of  Tourneur,  of  Ben  Jonson,  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  and  of  their  lesser  brethren  ; 
from  the  splendid  ore  of  Marlowe,  only  half  molten 
and  half  freed  from  dross,  down  to  the  shining  metal 
of  Massinger,  smooth  and  silvery  as  only  tinsel  can  be- 
In  all  the  works  of  our  Elizabethans,  we  see  not 
only  the  assimilated  intellectual  wealth  of  Italy,  but 
we  see  the  deep  impression,  the  indelible  picture  in 
the  memory,  of  Italy  itself  ;  the  positive,  unallegorical^ 
essentially  secular  mode  of  thought ;  the  unascetic, 
aesthetic,  eminently  human  mode  of  feeling  ;  the  artistic 
desire  for  clear  and  harmonious  form  ;  the  innumerable 
tendencies  and  habits  which  sever  the  Elizabethans 
so  completely  from  the  Middle  Ages,  and  bring  them 
so  near  at  once  to  ourselves  and  to  the  ancients, 
making  them  at  once  antique  and  modern,  in  opposi- 
tion to  mediaeval ;  these  essential  characters  and  the 
vast  bulk  of  absolute  scientific  fact  and  formula,  of 
philosophic  opinion,  of  artistic  shape,  of  humanistic 
learning,  are  only  one-half  of  the  debt  of  our  sixteenth 
century  to  the  Italy  of  the  Renaissance.  The  delicate 
form  of  the  Italian  sonnet,  as  copied  by  Sidney  from 

6 


66  EUPHORION. 

Bembo  and  Molza  and  Costanzo,  contained  within  it 
the  exotic  and  exquisite  ideal  passion  of  the  "  Vita 
Nuova  "  and  Petrarch.  With  their  bright,  undulating 
stanza  Spenser  received  from  Ariosto  and  Tasso 
the  richly  coloured  spirit  of  the  Italian  descriptive 
epic.  With  the  splendid  involutions  of  Machiavelli's 
and  Guicciardini's  prose  Bacon  learned  their  cool  and 
disimpassioned  philosophy.  From  the  reading  of 
Politian  and  Lorenzo  dei  Medici,  from  the  sight  of 
the  Psyche  of  Raphael,  the  Europa  of  Veronese,  the 
Ariadne  of  Tintoret,  men  like  Greene  and  Dorset 
learned  that  revival  of  a  more  luscious  and  pictorial 
antique  which  was  brought  to  perfection  in  Shake- 
speare's "Venus  and  Adonis"  and  Marlowe's  "Sestiad." 
From  the  Platonists  and  Epicureans  of  Renaissance 
Italy  our  greatest  dramatists  learned  that  cheerful 
and  serious  love  of  life,  that  solemn  and  manly  facing 
of  death,  that  sense  of  the  finiteness  of  man,  the 
inexhaustibleness  of  nature,  which  shines  out  in  such 
grand  paganism,  with  such  Olympian  serenity,  as  of 
the  bent  brows  and  smiling  lips  of  an  antique  Zeus, 
in  Shakespeare,  in  Marlowe,  in  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher,  even  in  the  sad  and  savage  Webster.  But 
with  the  abstract,  with  the  imbibed  modes  of  thought 
and  feeling,  with  the  imitated  forms,  the  Elizabethans 
brought  back  from  Italy  the  concrete,  the  individual, 
the  personal.  They  filled  their  works  with  Italian 
things  :  from  the  whole  plot  of  a  play  borrowed  from 
an  Italian  novel,  to  the  mere  passing  allusion  to  an 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TIS  TS.     67 

Italian  habit,  or  the  mere  quotation  of  an  Italian 
word  ;  from  the  full-length  picture  of  the  actions  of 
Italian  men  and  women,  down  to  the  mere  sketch, 
in  two  or  three  words,  of  a  bit  of  Italian  garden  or 
a  group  of  Italian  figures  ;  nay,  to  the  innumerable 
scraps  of  tiny  detail,  grotesque,  graceful,  or  richly 
coloured,  which  they  stuffed  into  all  their  works  :  allu- 
sions to  the  buffoons  of  the  mask  comedy,  to  the  high- 
voiced  singers,  to  the  dress  of  the  Venetian  merchants, 
to  the  step  of  a  dance  ;  to  the  pomegranate  in  the 
garden  or  the  cypress  on  the  hillside ;  often  mere 
names  of  Italian  things :  the  lavolta  and  corraitto 
dances,  the  Traghetto  ferry,  the  Rialto  bridge  ;  count- 
less little  touches,  trifling  to  us,  but  which  brought 
home  to  the  audience  at  the  Globe  or  at  Blackfriars 
that  wonderful  Italy  which  every  man  of  the  day  had 
travelled  through  at  least  in  spirit,  and  had  loved  at 
least  in  imagination.  And  of  this  wonderful  Italy  the 
Englishmen  of  the  days  of  Elizabeth  and  of  James 
knew  yet  another  side  ;  they  were  familiar,  whether 
travelled  or  untravelled,  with  yet  other  things  besides 
the  buffoons  and  singers  and  dancers,  the  scholars  and 
learned  ladies,  the  pomegranates,  and  cypresses  and 
roses  and  nightingales  ;  and  fascinated  by  something 
besides  the  green  lagoons,  the  clear  summer  nights, 
the  soft  spring  evenings  whose  fascination  wc  feel 
in  the  words  of  Jessica  and  Portia  and  Juliet.  The 
English  knew  and  were  haunted  by  the  crimes  of 
Italy  :  the  terrible  and  brilliant,  the  mysterious  and 


68  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

shadowy  crimes  of  lust  and  of  blood  which,  in  their 
most  gigantic  union  and  monstrous  enthronement  on 
the  throne  of  the  vdcar  of  Christ,  had  in  the  first 
terrified  glimpse,  awakened  the  tragic  impulse  in  the 
soldiers  of  Charles  VIII. 

We  can  picture  to  ourselves  the  innumerable  English 
travellers  who  went  to  Italy  greedy  for  life  and  know- 
ledge or  merely  obeying  a  fashion  of  the  day — travellers 
forced  into  far  closer  contact  with  the  natives  than  the 
men  of  the  time  of  Walpole  and  of  Beckford,  who 
were  met  by  French-speaking  hosts  and  lacqueys  and 
officials — travellers  also  thirsting  to  imbibe  the  very 
spirit  of  the  country  as  the  travellers  of  the  seventeenth 
and  eighteenth  centuries  never  thirsted  ;  and  their 
morbid  passion  for  the  stories  of  abominable  and  un- 
punished crime — crime  of  the  learned,  the  refined,  the 
splendid  parts  of  society — which  permeated  the  Italy 
of  the  deeply  corrupted  sixteenth  century.  We  can 
imagine  how  the  prosaic  merchants'  clerks  from  Lon- 
don ;  the  perfumed  dandies,  trying  on  Italian  clothes, 
rehearsing  Italian  steps  and  collecting  Italian  oaths, 
the  Faulconbridges  of  Shakespeare  and  Mr.  Gingleboys 
of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  sent  to  Italy  in  order  grace- 
fully to 

Kiss  the  hand  and  cry,  "  sweet  lady  ! " 
Say  they  had  been  at  Rome  and  seen  the  relics, 
Drunk  your  Verdea  wine,  and  rid  at  Naples — 

how  all  these  privileged  creatures  ferreted  about  for 
monstrous  crimes  with  which  to  horrify  their  stay-at- 


THE  ITALY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.    69 

home  countrymen  ;  how  the  rich  young  lords,  returning 
home  with  mincing  steps  and  high-pitched  Hsp,  sur- 
rounded by  a  train  of  parti-coloured,  dialect-jabbering 
Venetian  clowns,  deft  and  sinister  Neapolitan  fencing 
masters,  silver-voiced  singing  boys  decoyed  from  some 
church,  and  cynical  humanists  escaped  from  the  faggot 
or  the  gallows,  were  expected  to  bring  home  (together 
with  the  newest  pastoral  dramas,  lewd  novels,  Platonic 
philosophy  and  madrigals  set  in  complicated  counter- 
point) stories  of  hideous  wickedness,  of  the  murders 
and  rapes  and  poisonings  committed  by  the  dukes 
and  duchesses,  the  nobles  and  senators,  in  whose 
palaces  they  had  so  lately  supped  and  danced.  The 
crimes  of  Italy  fascinated  Englishmen  of  genius  with 
a  fascination  even  more  potent  than  that  exerted  over 
the  vulgar  imagination  of  mere  foppish  and  swash- 
buckler lovers  of  the  scandalous  and  the  sensational. 
They  fascinated  with  the  attraction  of  tragic  grandeur, 
of  psychological  strangeness,  of  moral  monstrosity,  a 
generation  in  whom  the  passionate  imagination  of  the 
playwright  was  curiously  blent  with  the  metaphysical 
analysis  of  the  philosopher  and  the  ethical  judgment 
of  the  Puritan.  To  these  men — ardent  and  serious 
even  in  their  profligacy,  imaginative  and  passionate 
even  in  their  Puritanism — all  sucking  avidly  at  this 
newly  found  Italian  civilization,  the  wickedness  of 
Italy  was  more  than  morbidly  attractive  or  morbidly 
appalling  ;  it  was  imaginatively  and  psychologically 
fascinating.     Whether  they  were    riotous  and  infidel 


70  EUPHORION. 

youths  like  the  dramatist  Greene,  recklessly  absorbing, 
in  their  avidity  for  new  life,  the  corruption  of  Italy, 
glorying  in  the  saying  that  "an  Englishman  Italianized 
is  a  demon  incarnate  ;  "  or  grave  and  austere  scholars 
like  Ascham,  thanking  Heaven  that  had  let  them  come 
undefiled  from  the  abominable  country  where  men 
were  as  free  to  sin  as  to  wear  shoe  or  pantocle  ;  what- 
ever the  nature  of  the  individual  traveller,  they  served 
only  to  increase  their  countrymen's  love  for  the  tales 
of  Italian  wickedness. 

And  the  dramatic  grandeur,  the  psychological 
interest,  the  mysterious  fascination  of  Italian  crime 
impressed  most  of  all  the  men  whose  work  was  with 
the  dramatic  and  the  psychological — the  Elizabethan 
playwrights.  The  crimes  of  Italy  furnished  the  sub- 
jects for  nearly  half  of  the  tragedies  written  in  the 
reigns  of  Elizabeth  and  of  James  I. ;  the  play  dealing 
with  national  history  or  with  antique  subjects  had 
not,  to  the  patriots  and  humanists  of  the  end  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  the  potent  attraction  of  the  play 
dealing  with  Italian  tales  of  lust  and  of  blood.  Italian 
novels  were  ransacked  for  subjects;  Italian  histories 
greedily  consulted  for  details  ;  travellers  from  Italy 
beset  for  new  anecdotes  gleaned  during  their  wander- 
ings. It  seemed  impossible  to  satisfy  the  general  greed 
for  Italian  horrors.  The  openly  narrated,  written, 
and  printed  misdeeds  of  the  previous  generation  of 
villains,  of  the  Borgias,  Sforzas,  and  Aragonese  of 
the  beginning  of  the    sixteenth  century,  were    fused 


THE  ITALY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS,  li 

with  the  whispered  tales  of  the  crimes  of  reigning 
Medicis,  Farnesi,  and  Estensi,  and  spiced  with  the 
details  of  domestic  scandal  and  bloodshed  of  the 
living  Italian  nobles  of  the  day — the  day,  be  it  remem- 
bered, of  Cencis  and  Accorambonis  and  Santa  Croces,. 
when  incest  and  parricide  could  be  bought  off  for 
money,  and  the  nobles  even  of  well-regulated  re- 
publics like  Venice  and  Lucca  kept  their  retinue  oi 
highly  paid  ruffians.  Various  tales  were  fused  together 
by  the  English  playwrights,  like  those  of  Vittoria 
Accoramboni,  of  Bianca  Cappello,  and  of  Isabella 
Orsini,  avowedly  in  Webster's  "  White  Devil : "  like 
those  of  Luisa  Strozzi  poisoned  for  resisting  Duke 
Alexander's  lust,  and  the  Duke  murdered  by  his 
pretended  pander  Lorenzino,  in  more  altered  and  dis- 
guised fashion,  in  Tourneur's  "Revenger's  Tragedy;" 
numberless  ghastly  incidents  picked  up,  perhaps,  from 
old  chronicles  and  travellers'  tales,  like  the  dance  of 
madmen,  the  waxen  im.ages  of  murdered  husband  and 
children,  the  were-wolf  madness  of  the  fratricide  Fer- 
dinand, added  by  Webster  to  Bandello's  story  of  the 
Duchess  of  Amalfi  ;  like  the  corpse  painted  up  with 
poison  that  the  guilty  lover  might  suck  death  in  kiss- 
ing its  revived  beauties,  tacked  on  by  Massinger  to 
his  play  of  the  jealousy  of  some  mythical  Duke  of 
Milan,  himself  a  compromise  between  Maximilian 
Sforza  despoiled  by  Charles  V.  and  Filippo  Maria 
Visconti  murdering  his  guiltless  wife  Beatrice  di 
Tenda.    Details  of  crime  were  heaped  together,  either 


72  EUPHORION. 

as  part  of  the  action  or  as  allusions,  as  in  Webster's 
two  great  plays,  in  which  there  occurs  poisoning  by- 
means  of  the  leaves  of  a  book,  poisoning  by  the  poi- 
soned lips  of  a  picture,  poisoning  by  a  helmet,  poison- 
ing by  the  pommel  of  a  saddle.  Crimes  were  multi- 
plied by  means  of  subordinate  plots  and  unnecessary 
incidents,  like  the  double  vengeance  of  Richardetto 
and  Hippolita  in  Ford's  "  Giovanni  and  Annabella," 
where  both  characters  are  absolutely  unnecessary  to 
the  main  story  of  the  horrible  love  of  the  hero  and 
heroine  ;  like  the  murders  of  Levidulcia  and  Sebastian 
in  Tourneur's  "  Atheist's  Tragedy,"  and  the  com- 
pletely unnecessary  though  extremely  pathetic  death 
of  young  Marcello  in  Webster's  "  White  Devil  ;  "  until 
the  plays  were  brought  to  a  close  by  the  gradual  ex- 
termination of  all  the  principal  performers,  and  only 
a  few  confidants  and  dummies  remained  to  bury  the 
corpses  which  strewed  the  stage.  Imaginary  m.onsters 
were  fashioned  out  of  half-a-dozen  Neapolitan  and 
Milanese  princes,  by  Ford,  by  Beaumont  and  Fletcher, 
by  Middleton,  by  Marston,  even  by  the  light  and 
graceful  Philip  Massinger :  mythical  villains,  Ferdi- 
nands, Lodowicks,  and  Fernezes,  who  yet  fell  short  of 
the  frightful  realities  of  men  like  Sigismondo  Mala- 
testa,  Alexander  VI.,  and  Pier  Luigi  Farnese  ;  nay, 
mere  typical  monsters,  with  no  name  save  their  vices, 
Lussuriosos,  Gelosos,  Ambitiosos,  and  Vindicis,  like 
those  drawn  by  the  strong  and  savage  hand  of  Cyril 
Tourneur. 


THE  IT  A  LY  OF  ELIZA  BE  THA  N  DRA  MA  TIS  TS.     7  3 

Nothing  which  the  English  stage  could  display 
seemed  to  the  minds  of  English  playwrights  and  the 
public  to  give  an  adequate  picture  of  the  abominations 
of  Italy  ;  much  as  they  heaped  up  horrors  and  com- 
bined them  with  artistic  skill,  much  as  they  forced  into 
sight,  there  yet  remained  an  abyss  of  evil  which  the 
English  tongue  refused  to  mention,  but  which  weighed 
upon  the  English  mind  ;  and  which,  unspoken,  nay 
(and  it  is  the  glory  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists 
excepting  Ford),  unhinted,  yet  remained  as  an  incubus 
in  the  consciousness  of  the  playwrights  and  the  public, 
was  in  their  thoughts  when  they  wrote  and  heard  such 
savage  misanthropic  outbursts  as  those  of  Tourneur 
and  of  Marston.  The  sense  of  the  rottenness  of  the 
country  whence  they  were  obtaining  their  intellectual 
nourishment,  haunted  with  a  sort  of  sickening  fascina- 
tion the  imaginative  and  psychological  minds  of  the 
late  sixteenth  century,  of  the  men  who  had  had  time 
to  outgrow  the  first  cynical  plunge  of  the  rebellious 
immature  contemporaries  of  Greene,  Peele,  and  Mar- 
lowe into  that  dissolved  civilization.  And  of  the 
great  men  who  were  thus  enthralled  by  Italy  and 
Italian  evil,  only  Shakespeare  and  Massinger  maintain 
or  regain  their  serenity  and  hopefulness  of  spirit^ 
resist  the  incubus  of  horror  :  Shakespeare  from  the 
immense  scope  of  his  vision,  which  permitted  him 
to  pass  over  the  base  and  frightful  parts  of  human 
nature  and  see  its  purer  and  higher  sides  ;  Massinger 


74  EUPHORION. 

from  the  very  superficiality  of  his  insight  and  the  nar- 
rowness of  his  sympathies,  which  prevented  his  ever 
thoroughly  realizing  the  very  horrors  he  had  himself 
invented.  But  on  the  minds  less  elastic  than  that  of 
Shakespeare,  and  less  superficial  than  that  of  Mas- 
singer,  the  Italian  evil  weighed  like  a  nightmare. 
With  an  infinitely  powerful  and  passionate  imagina- 
tion, and  an  exquisitely  subtle  faculty  of  mental  analy- 
sis ;  only  lately  freed  from  the  dogma  of  the  Middle 
Ages ;  unsettled  in  their  philosophy ;  inclined  by  whole- 
sale classical  reading  to  a  sort  of  negative  atheism,  a 
fatalistic  and  half-melancholy  mixture  of  epicurism 
and  stoicism  ;  yet  keenly  alive,  from  study  of  the 
Bible  and  of  religious  controversies,  to  all  questions  of 
right  and  wrong  ;  thus  highly  wrought  and  deeply 
perplexed,  the  minds  of  the  Elizabethan  poets  were 
impressed  by  the  wickedness  of  Italy  as  by  the  horrible 
deeds  of  one  whom  we  are  accustomed  to  venerate  as 
our  guide,  whom  we  cannot  but  love  as  our  benefactor, 
whom  we  cannot  but  admire  as  our  superior  :  it  was  a 
sense  of  frightful  anomaly,  of  putrescence  in  beauty 
and  splendour,  of  death  in  life  and  life  in  death,  which 
made  the  English  psychologist-poets  savage  and 
sombre,  cynical  and  wrathful  and  hopeless.  The  in- 
fluence is  the  same  on  all,  and  the  difference  of  attitude 
is  slight,  and  due  to  individual  characters  ;  but  the 
gloom  is  the  same  in  each  of  them.  In  the  noble  and 
tender  nature  of  Webster  the  sense  is  one  of  ineffable 


THE  ITALY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS.  75 

sadness,  unmarred  by  cynicism,  but  unbrightened  by 
hope.  The  villains,  even  if  successful  until  death,  are 
mere  hideous  phantoms — 

these  wretched  eminent  things 
Leave  no  more  fame  behind  'em,  than  should  one 
Fall  in  a  frost,  and  leave  his  print  in  snow — 

they  are  the  victims  of  tortured  conscience,  or,  worse 
still,  the  owners  of  petrified  hearts  ;  there  is  nothing 
to  envy  in  them.  But  none  the  better  is  it  for  the 
good  :  if  Ferdinand,  Bosola,  Brachiano,  and  Flaminio 
perish  miserably,  it  is  only  after  having  done  to  death 
the  tender  and  brave  Duchess,  the  gentle  Antonio,  the 
chivalric  Marcello  ;  there  is  virtue  on  earth,  but  there 
is  no  justice  in  heaven.  The  half-pagan,  half-puritanic 
feeling  of  Webster  bursts  out  in  the  dying  speech  of 
the  villain  Bosola — 

O,  this  gloomy  world ! 
In  what  a  shadow,  or  deep  pit  of  darkness, 
Doth  womanish  and  fearful  mankind  live  ! 
Let  worthy  minds  ne'er  stagger  in  distrust 
To  sufier  death  or  shame  for  what  is  just. 

Of  real  justice  in  this  life  or  compensation  in  another, 
there  is  no  thought  :  Webster,  though  a  Puritan  in 
spirit,  is  no  Christian  in  faith.  On  Ford  the  influence 
is  different ;  although  equal,  perhaps,  in  genius  to 
Webster,  surpassing  him  even  in  intense  tragic  passion, 
he  was  far  below  Webster,  and,  indeed,  far  below  all 
his   generation,    in    moral    fibre.     The   sight   of  evil 


76  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

fascinates  him  ;  his  conscience  staggers,  his  sympathies 
are  bedraggled  in  foulness  ;  in  the  chaos  of  good  and 
evil  he  loses  his  reckoning,  and  recognizes  the  superi- 
ority only  of  strength  of  passion,  of  passion  for  good 
or  evil  :  the  incestuous  Giovanni,  daring  his  enemies 
like  a  wild  beast  at  bay  and  cheating  them  of  their 
revenge  by  murdering  the  object  of  his  horrible  pas- 
sion, is  as  heroic  in  the  eyes  of  Ford  as  the  magnani- 
mous Princess  of  Sparta,  bearing  with  unflinching 
spirit  the  misfortunes  poured  down  upon  her,  and 
leading  off  the  dance  while  messenger  succeeds  mes- 
senger of  evil,  till,  free  from  her  duties  as  a  queen, 
she  sinks  down  dead.  Cyril  Tourneur  and  John 
Marston  are  far  more  incomplete  in  genius  than 
either  Webster  or  Ford,  although  Tourneur  sometimes 
obtains  a  lurid  and  ghastly  tragic  intensity  which 
more  than  equals  Ford  when  at  his  best ;  and  Marston, 
in  the  midst  of  crabbedness  and  dulness,  sometimes 
has  touches  of  pathos  and  Michelangelesque  fore- 
shortenings  of  metaphor  worthy  of  Webster.  But 
Tourneur  and  Marston  have  neither  the  constant 
sympathy  with  oppressed  virtue  of  the  author  of  the 
"  Duchess  of  Malfy,"  nor  the  blind  fury  of  passion  of 
the  poet  of  Giovanni  and  Annabella  ;  they  look  on 
grim  and  hopeless  spectators  at  the  world  of  fatalistic 
and  insane  wickedness  which  they  have  created,  in 
which  their  heroes  and  heroines  and  villains  are  slowly 
entangled  in  inextricable  evil.  The  men  and  women 
of  Tourneur  and  Marston  are  scarcely  men  and  women 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     77 

at  all  :  they  are  mere  vague  spectres,  showing  their 
grisly  wounds  and  moaning  out  their  miserable  fate. 
There  is  around  them  a  clammy  moral  darkness, 
dispelled  only  by  the  ghastly  flashes  of  lurid  virtue 
of  maniacs  like  Tourneur's  Vindici  and  Hippolito  ; 
a  crypt-like  moral  stillness,  haunted  by  strange  evil 
murmurs,  broken  only  by  the  hysterical  sobs  and 
laughs  of  Marston's  Antonios  and  Pandulphos.  At 
the  most  there  issues  out  of  the  blood-reeking  depth 
a  mighty  yell  of  pain,  a  tremendous  imprecation  not 
only  at  sinful  man  but  at  unsympathizing  nature,  like 
that  of  Marston's  old  Doge,  dethroned,  hunted  down, 
crying  aloud  into  the  grey  dawn-mists  of  the  desolate 
marsh  by  the  lagoon — 

O  thou  all-bearing  earth 
Which  men  do  gape  for  till  thou  cram'st  their  mouths 
And  choak'st  their  throats  for  dust  :  O  charme  thy  breast 
And  let  me  sinke  into  thee.     Look  who  knocks  ; 
Andrugio  calls.     But  O,  she's  deafe  and  blinde. 
A  wretch  but  leane  relief  on  earth  can  finde. 

The  tragic  sense,  the  sense  of  utter  blank  evil,  is 
stronger  in  all  these  Elizabethan  painters  of  Italian 
crime  than  perhaps  in  any  other  tragic  writers.  There 
is,  in  the  great  and  sinister  pictures  of  Webster,  of 
Ford,  of  Tourneur,  and  of  Marston,  no  spot  of  light, 
no  distant  bright  horizon.  There  is  no  loving  suffer- 
ing, resigned  to  suffer  and  to  pardon,  like  that  of 
Desdemona ;    no    consoling  affection   like  Cordelia's, 


78  EUPHORWN. 

in  whose  gentle  embrace  the  poor  bruised  soul  may- 
sink  into  rest  ;  no  passionate  union  in  death  with 
the  beloved,  like  the  union  of  Romeo  and  Juliet  ; 
nothing  but  implacable  cruelty,  violent  death  re- 
ceived with  agonized  protest,  or  as  the  release  from 
unmitigated  misery  with  which  the  wretch  has  become 
familiar, 

As  the  tann'd  galley  slave  is  with  his  oar. 

Neither  is  there  in  these  plays  that  solemn  sense  of 
heavenly  vengeance,  of  the  fatality  hanging  over  a 
house  and  which  will  be  broken  when  guilt  shall  have 
been  expiated,  such  as  lends  a  sort  of  serene  background 
of  eternal  justice  to  the  terrible  tales  of  Thebes  and 
Argos.  There  is  for  these  men  no  fatality  save  the 
evil  nature  of  man,  no  justice  save  the  doubling  of 
crime,  no  compensation  save  revenge  :  there  is  for 
Webster  and  Ford  and  Tourneur  and  Marston  no 
heaven  above,  wrathful  but  placable ;  there  are  no 
•Gods  revengeful  but  just  :  there  is  nothing  but  this 
blood-stained  and  corpse-strewn  earth,  defiled  by  lust- 
burnt  and  death-hungering  men,  felling  each  other 
down  and  trampling  on  one  another  blindly  in  the 
eternal  darkness  which  surrounds  them.  The  world 
of  these  great  poets  is  not  the  open  world  with  its  light 
and  its  air,  its  purifying  storms  and  lightnings :  it  is 
the  darkened  Italian  palace,  with  its  wrought-iron  bars 
preventing  escape  ;  its  embroidered  carpets  muffling 
the  foot   steps  ;    its  hidden,  suddenly  yawning  trap- 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     79 

doors  ;  its  arras-hangings  concealing  masked  ruffians  ; 
its  garlands  of  poisoned  flowers  ;  its  long  suites  of  un- 
tenanted darkened  rooms,  through  which  the  wretch 
is  pursued  by  the  half-crazed  murderer  ;  while  below, 
in  the  cloistered  court,  the  clanking  armour  and  stamp- 
ing horses,  and  above,  in  the  carved  and  gilded  hall, 
the  viols  and  lutes  and  cornets  make  a  cheery  trium- 
phal concert,  and  drown  the  cries  of  the  victim, 

II. 

Such  is  the  Italy  of  the  Renaissance  as  we  see  it 
in  the  v/orks  of  our  tragic  playwrights  :  a  country  of 
mysterious  horror,  the  sinister  reputation  of  which 
lasted  two  hundred  years ;  lasted  triumphantly  through- 
out the  light  and  finikin  eighteenth  century,  and  found 
its  latest  expression  in  the  grim  and  ghastly  romances 
of  the  school  of  Ann  Radcliff,  romances  which  are  but 
the  last  puny  and  grotesque  descendants  of  the  great 
stock  of  Italian  tragedies,  born  of  the  first  terror- 
stricken  meeting  of  the  England  of  Elizabeth  with 
the  Italy  of  the  late  Renaissance.  Is  the  impression 
received  by  the  Elizabethan  playwrights  a  correct 
impression .''  Was  Italy  in  the  sixteenth  century 
that  land  of  horrors  ?  Reviewing  in  our  memory  the 
literature  and  art  of  the  Italian  Renaissance,  remember- 
ing the  innumerable  impressions  of  joyous  and  healthy 
life  with  which  it  has  filled  us  ;  recalling  the  bright 
and  thoughtless  rhymes  of  Lorenzo  dei    Medici,  of 


8o  EUPHORION. 

Politian,  of  Berni,  and  of  Ariosto ;  the  sweet  and 
tender  poetry  of  Bembo  and  Vittoria  Colonna  and 
Tasso  ;  the  bluff  sensuality  of  novelists  like  Bandello 
and  Masuccio,  the  Aristophanesque  laughter  of  the 
comedy  of  Bibbiena  and  of  Beolco  ;  seeing  in  our 
mind's  eye  the  stately  sweet  matrons  and  noble 
senators  of  Titian,  the  virginal  saints  and  madonnas 
of  Raphael,  the  jo}'ous  angels  of  Correggic  ; — recapitu- 
lating rapidly  all  our  impressions  of  this  splendid  time 
of  exuberant  vitality,  of  this  strong  and  serene  Renais- 
sance, we  answer  without  hesitation,  and  with  only 
a  smile  of  contempt  at  our  credulous  ancestors — no. 
The  Italy  of  the  Renaissance  was,  of  all  things  that 
have  ever  existed  or  ever  could  exist,  the  most  utterly 
unlike  the  nightmare  visions  of  men  such  as  Webster 
and  Ford,  Marston  and  Tourneur.  The  only  Elizabe- 
than drama  which  really  represents  the  Italy  of  the 
Renaissance  is  the  comedy  of  Shakespeare,  of  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher,  and  of  Ben  Jonson  and  Massinger: 
to  the  Renaissance  belong  those  clear  and  sunny 
figures,  Portia,  Antonio,  Gratiano,  Viola,  Petruchio, 
Bellario,  and  Almira  ;  their  faces  do  we  see  on  the 
canvases  of  Titian  and  the  frescoes  of  Raphael ;  they 
are  the  real  children  of  the  Italian  Renaissance. 
These  frightful  Brachianos  and  Annabellas  and  Ferdi- 
nands and  Corombonas  and  Vindicis  and  Pieros  of 
the  "White  Devil,"  of  the  "Duchess  of  Malfy,"  of  the 
"  Revenger's  Tragedy,"  and  of  "  Antonio  and  Mellida," 
are   mere  fantastic    horrors,  as  false   as  the    Counts 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     8  < 

Udolpho,  the  Spalatros,  the  Zastrozzis,  and  all  thei? 
grotesquely  ghastly  pseudo-Italian  brethren  of  eighty 
years  ago. 

And,  indeed,  the  Italy  of  the  Renaissance,  as  re- 
presented in  its  literature  and  its  art,  is  the  very  nega- 
tion of  Elizabethan  horrors.  Of  all  the  mystery,  the 
colossal  horror  and  terror  of  our  dramatists,  there  is 
scarce  the  faintest  trace  in  the  intellectual  productions 
of  the  Italian  Renaissance.  The  art  is  absolutely 
stainless  :  no  scenes  of  horror,  no  frightful  martyrdoms, 
as  with  the  Germans  under  Albrecht  Diirer;  no 
abominable  butcheries,  as  with  the  Bolognese  of  the 
seventeenth  century  ;  no  macerated  saints  and  tattered 
assassins,  as  with  the  Spaniards  ;  no  mystery,  no  con- 
tortion, no  horrors  :  vigorous  and  serene  beauty,  pure 
and  cheerful  life,  real  or  ideal,  on  wall  or  canvas,  in 
bronze  or  in  marble.  The  literature  is  analogous  to 
the  art,  only  less  perfect,  more  tainted  with  the  weak- 
ness of  the  flesh,  less  ideal,  more  real.  It  is  essentially 
human,  in  the  largest  sense  of  the  word  ;  or  if  it  cease, 
in  creatures  like  Aretine,  to  be  humanly  clean,  it 
becomes  merely  satyrlike,  swinish,  hircose.  But  it  is 
never  savage  in  lust  or  violence  ;  it  is  quite  free  from 
the  element  of  ferocity.  It  is  essentially  light  and 
quiet  and  well  regulated,  sane  and  reasonable,  never 
staggering  or  blinded  by  excess  :  it  is  full  of  intelligent 
discrimination,  of  intelligent  leniency,  of  well-bred 
reserved  sympathy  ;  it  is  civilized  as  are  the  wide  well- 
paved  streets  of  Ferrara  compared  with  the  tortuous 

7 


82  EUPHORION. 

black  alleys  of  mediaeval  Paris  ;  as  are  the  well-lit, 
clean,  spacious  palaces  of  Michelozzo  or  Bramante 
compared  with  the  unhealthy,  uncomfortable  mediaeval 
castles  of  Durer's  etchings.  It  is  indeed  a  trifle  too 
civilized  ;  too  civilized  to  produce  every  kind  of 
artistic  fruit ;  it  is — and  here  comes  the  crushing 
difference  between  the  Italian  Renaissance  and  our 
Elizabethans'  pictures  of  it — it  is,  this  beautiful  rich 
literature  of  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries, 
completely  deficient  in  every  tragic  element ;  it  has 
intuition  neither  for  tragic  event  nor  for  tragic  cha- 
racter ;  it  affords  not  a  single  tragic  page  in  its  poems 
and  novels  ;  it  is  incapable,  after  the  most  laborious 
and  conscientious  study  of  Euripides  and  Seneca, 
utterly  and  miserably  incapable  of  producing  a  single 
real  tragedy,  anything  which  is  not  a  sugary  pastoral 
or  a  pompous  rhetorical  exercise.  The  epic  poets  of 
the  Italian  Renaissance,  Pulci,  Boiardo,  Berni,  and 
Ariosto,  even  the  stately  and  sentimental  Tasso,  are 
no  epic  poets  at  all.  They  are  mere  light  and  amusing 
gossips,  some  of  them  absolute  buffoons.  Their  ad- 
ventures over  hill  and  dale  are  mere  riding  parties  ; 
their  fights  mere  festival  tournaments,  their  enchant- 
ments mere  pageant  wonders.  Events  like  the  death 
of  Hector,  the  slaughter  of  Penelope's  suitors,  the 
festive  massacre  of  Chriemhilt,  the  episode  of  Alfonso 
the  Chaste  sending  Bernardo  del  Carpio  his  father's 
corpse  on  horseback — things  like  these  never  enter 
their    minds.       When    tragic    events    do    by    some 


THE  IT  A  L  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     83 

accident  come  into  their  narration,  they  cease  to  be 
tragic  ;  they  are  frittered  away  into  mere  pretty  con- 
ceits like  the  death  of  Isabella  and  the  sacrifice  of 
Olympia  in  the  "Orlando  Furioso  ;"  or  melted  down 
into  vague  pathos,  like  the  burning  of  Olindo  and 
Sofronia,  and  the  death  of  Clorinda  by  the  sentimental 
Tasso.  Neither  poet,  the  one  with  his  cheerfulness, 
the  other  with  his  mild  melancholy,  brings  home, 
conceives  the  horror  of  the  situation  ;  the  one  treats 
the  tragic  in  the  spirit  almost  of  burlesque,  the  other 
entirely  in  the  spirit  of  elegy.  So,  again,  with  the 
novel  writers  :  these  professional  retailers  of  anecdotes 
will  pick  up  any  subject  to  fill  their  volumes.  In 
default  of  pleasant  stories  of  filthy  intrigue  or  lewd 
jest,  men  like  Cinthio  and  Bandello  will  gabble  off 
occasionally  some  tragic  story,  picked  out  of  a  history 
book  or  recently  heard  from  a  gossip  :  the  stories  of 
Harmodius  and  Aristogeiton,  of  Disdemona  and  the 
Moorish  Captain,  of  Romeo  Montecchio  and  Giulietta 
Cappelletti,  of  the  Cardinal  d'xA-ragona  and  the 
Duchess  of  Amalfi,  of  unknown  grotesque  Persian 
Sophis  and  Turkish  Bassas — stories  of  murder,  mas- 
sacre, rape,  incest,  anything  and  everything,  prattled 
off,  with  a  few  words  of  vapid  compassion  and  stale 
moralizing,  in  the  serene,  cheerful,  chatty  manner  in 
which  they  recount  their  Decameronian  escapades  or 
Rabelaisian  repartees.  As  it  is  with  tragic  action,  so 
is  it  with  tragic  character.  The  literature  of  the  country 
which  suggested  to  our  Elizabethans  their  colossal  vil- 


84  EUPHORION. 

lains,  can  display  only  a  few  conventional  monsters, 
fire-eating,  swashbuckler  Rodomonts  and  Sultan 
Malechs,  strutting  and  puffing  like  the  villains  of 
puppet-shows  ;  Aladins  and  Ismenos,  enchanters  and 
ogres  fit  to  be  put  into  Don  Quixote's  library :  mere 
conventional  rag  puppets,  doubtless  valued  as  such 
and  no  more  by  the  shrewd  contemporaries  of  Ariosto 
and  Tasso.  The  inhabitants  of  Tasso's  world  of 
romance  are  pale  chivalric  unrealities,  lifeless  as 
Spenser's  half-allegoric  knights  and  ladies  ;  those  of 
Pulci's  Ardenne  forests  and  Cathay  deserts  are  buffoons 
such  as  Florentine  shopmen  may  have  trapped  out 
for  their  amusement  in  rusty  armour  and  garlands  of 
sausages.  The  only  lifelike  heroes  and  heroines  are 
Ariosto's.  And  they  are  most  untragic,  unromantic. 
The  men  are  occasionally  small  scoundrels,  but 
unintentionally  on  the  part  of  the  author.  They 
show  no  deep  moral  cancers  or  plague-spots  ;  they 
display  cheerfully  all  the  petty  dishonour  and  small 
lusts  which  the  Renaissance  regarded  as  mere  flesh  and 
blood  characteristics.  So  also  Ariosto's  ladies  :  the 
charming,  bright  women,  coquettish  or  Amazonian, 
are  frail  and  fickle  to  the  degree  which  was  permissible 
to  a  court  lady,  who  should  be  neither  prudish  nor 
fast ;  doing  unchaste  things  and  listening  to  unchaste 
words  simply,  gracefully,  without  prurience  or  horror  ; 
perfectly  well-bred,  gentili,  as  Ariosto  calls  them  ; 
prudent  also,  according  to  the  notions  of  the  day, 
in    limiting    their    imprudence.      The   adventure    of 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     8  5 

Fiordispina  with  Ricciardetto  would  have  branded  an 
English  serving-wench  as  a  harlot ;  the  intentions  of 
Roger  towards  the  lady  he  has  just  rescued  from  the 
sea-monster  might  have  blushingly  been  attributed  by 
Spenser  to  one  of  his  satyrs  ;  but  these  were  escapades 
quite  within  Ariosto's  notions  of  what  was  permitted 
to  a  gentil  cavaliero  and  a  nobil  donzella ;  and  if 
Fiordispina  and  Roger  are  not  like  Florimell  and  Sir 
Calidore,  still  less  do  they  in  the  faintest  degree 
resemble  Tourneur  and  Marston's  Levidulcias  and 
Isabellas  and  Lussuriosos.  And  with  the  exception 
perhaps  of  this  heroine  and  this  hero,  we  cannot  find 
any  very  great  harm  in  Ariosto's  ladies  and  gentle- 
men :  we  may,  indeed,  feel  indignant  when  we  think 
that  they  replace  the  chaste  and  noble  impossibilities 
of  earlier  romance,  the  Rolands  and  Percivals,  the 
Beatrices  and  Lauras  of  the  past ;  when  w^e  consider 
that  they  represent  for  Ariosto,  not  the  bespattered 
but  the  spotless,  not  the  real  but  the  ideal.  All  this 
may  awaken  in  us  contempt  and  disgust ;  but  if  we 
consider  these  figures  in  themselves  as  realities,  and 
compare  them  with  the  evil  figures  of  our  drama,  we 
find  that  they  are  mere  venial  sinners — light,  fickle, 
amorous,  fibbing — very  human  in  their  faults  ;  human, 
trifling,  mild,  not  at  all  monstrous,  like  all  the  art 
products  of  the  Renaissance.^^ 

'  The  "Orlando  Innamorato"  of  Boiardo  contains,  parti,  canto 
S,  a  story  too  horrible  and  grotesque  for  me  to  narrate,  of  a 
monster  born  of  Marchino  and  his  murdered  sister-in-law,  which 
forms  a  strange  exception  to  my  rule,  even  as  does,  for  instance, 


86  EUPHORION. 

A  serene  and  spotless  art,  a  literature  often  impure 
but  always  cheerful,  rational,  civilized — this  is  what 
the  Italian  Renaissance  displays  when  we  seek  in  it  for 
spirits  at  all  akin  to  Webster  or  Lope  de  Vega,  to  Hol- 
bein or  Ribera.  To  find  the  tragic  we  must  wait  for 
the  Bolognese  painters  of  the  seventeenth  centur}-,  for 
Metastasio  and  Alfieri  in  the  eighteenth  ;  it  is  useless 
seeking  it  in  this  serene  and  joyous  Renaissance. 
Where,  then,  in  the  midst  of  these  spotless  virgins, 
these  noble  saints,  these  brilliant  pseudo-chivalric 
joustings  and  revels,  these  sweet  and  sonneteering 
pastorals,  these  scurrilous  adventures  and  loose 
buffooneries  ;  where  in  this  Italian  Renaissance  are 
the  horrors  which  fascinated  so  strangely  our  English 
playwrights  :  the  fratricides  and  incests,  the  frightful 
crimes  of  lust  and  blood  which  haunted  and  half 
crazed  the  genius  of  Tourneur  and  Marston  ?  Where 
in  this  brilliant  and  courteous  and  humane  and  civi- 
lized nation  are  the  gigantic  villains  whose  terrible 
features  were  drawn  with  such  superb  awful ness  of 
touch  by  Webster  and  Ford  ?  Where  in  this  Re- 
naissance of  Italian  literature,  so  cheerful  and  light 
of  conscience,  is  the  foul  and  savage  Renaissance  of 
English  tragedy  ?  Does  the  art  of  Ital}'  tell  an  im- 
possible, universal  lie?  or  is  the  art  of  England  the 
victim  of  an  impossible,  universal  hallucination  ? 

Matteo  di  Giovanni's  Massacre  of  the  Innocents.  Can  this 
story  have  been  suggested,  a  ghastly  nightmare,  by  the  frightful 
tale  of  Sigismondo  Malatesta  and  the  beautiful  Borbona,  which 
was  current  in  Boiardo's  day  .'' 


THE  [TA  LY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     87 

Neither ;  for  art  can  neither  tell  lies  nor  be  the 
victim  of  hallucination.  The  horror  exists,  and  the 
light-heartedness  exists  ;  the  unhealthiness  and  the 
healthiness.  For  as,  in  that  weird  story  by  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne,  the  daughter  of  the  Paduan  wizard  is 
nurtured  on  the  sap  and  fruit  and  the  emanations  of 
poisonous  plants,  till  they  become  her  natural  susten- 
ance, and  she  thrives  and  is  strong  and  lovely  ;  while 
the  youth,  bred  in  the  ordinary  pure  air  and  nourished 
on  ordinary  wholesome  food,  faints  and  staggers  as 
soon  as  he  breathes  the  fatal  odours  of  the  poison 
garden,  and  sinks  down  convulsed  and  crazed  at  the 
first  touch  of  his  mistress'  blooming  but  death-breath- 
ing lips  ;  so  also  the  Italians,  steeped  in  the  sin  of 
their  country,  seeing  it  daily  and  hourly,  remained 
intellectually  healthy  and  serene  ;  while  the  English, 
coming  from  a  purer  moral  atmosphere,  were  seized 
with  moral  sickness  of  horror  at  what  they  had  seen 
and  could  not  forget.  And  the  nation  which  was 
chaste  and  true  wrote  tales  of  incest  and  treacher)-, 
while  the  nation  which  was  foul  and  false  wrote 
poetry  of  shepherds  and  knights-errant. 

The  monstrous  immorality  of  the  Italian  Renaiss- 
ance, as  I  have  elsewhere  shown  in  greater  detail, 
was,  like  the  immorality  of  any  other  historical  period, 
not  a  formal  rebellion  against  God,  but  a  natural 
result  of  the  evolution  of  the  modern  world.  The 
Italy  of  the  Renaissance  was  one  of  the  many  victims 
v/hich  inevitable  moral  sequence  dooms  to  be  evil  in 


S8  EUPHORION. 

order  that  others  may  learn  to  be  good  :  it  was  a 
sacrifice  which  consisted  in  a  sin,  a  sacrifice  requiring 
frightful  expiation  on  the  part  of  the  victim.  For 
Italy  was  subjected,  during  well-nigh  two  centuries,  to 
a  slow  process  of  moral  destruction  ;  a  process  whose 
various  factors — political  disorganization,  religious  in- 
difference, scientific  scepticism,  wholesale  enthusiasm 
for  the  antique,  breaking-up  of  mediaeval  standards, 
and  excessive  growth  of  industry,  commerce,  and 
speculative  thought  at  the  expense  of  warlike  and 
religious  habits — were  at  the  same  time  factors  in  the 
great  advent  of  modern  civilization,  of  which  Italy 
was  the  pioneer  and  the  victim  ;  a  process  whose 
result  was,  in  Italy,  insensibly  and  inevitably  to  reduce 
to  chaos  the  moral  and  political  organization  of  the 
nation  ;  at  once  rendering  men  completely  unable  to 
discriminate  between  good  and  evil,  and  enabling  a 
certain  proportion  of  them  to  sin  with  complete  im- 
punity :  creating  on  the  one  hand  moral  indifference, 
and  on  the  other  social  irresponsibility.  Civilization 
had  kept  pace  with  demoralization  ;  the  faculty  of 
reasoning  over  cause  and  effect  had  developed  at 
the  expense  of  the  faculty  of  judging  of  actions.  The 
Italians  of  the  Renaissance,  little  by  little,  could  judge 
only  of  the  adaptation  of  means  to  given  ends  ; 
whether  means  or  ends  were  legitimate  or  illegitimate 
they  soon  became  unable  to  perceive  and  even  unable 
to  ask.  Success  was  the  criterion  of  all  action,  and 
power  was   its   limits.     Active  and    furious    national 


THE  ITAL  Y  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     89 

wickedness  there  was  not :  there  was  mere  moral 
inertia  on  the  part  of  the  people.  The  Italians  of  the 
Renaissance  neither  resisted  evil  nor  rebelled  against 
^'irtue ;  they  were  indifferent  to  both,  and  a  little 
pressure  sufficed  to  determine  them  to  either.  In  the 
governed  classes,  where  the  law  was  equal  between 
men,  and  industry  and  commerce  kept  up  healthy 
activity,  the  pressure  was  towards  good.  The  artizans 
and  merchants  lived  decent  lives,  endowed  hospitals, 
listened  to  edifying  sermons,  and  were  even  moved 
(for  a  few  moments)  by  men  like  San  Bernardino  or 
Savonarola.  In  the  governing  classes,  where  all  right 
lay  in  force,  where  the  necessity  of  self-defence  in- 
duced treachery  and  violence,  and  irresponsibility 
produced  excess,  the  pressure  was  towards  evil.  The 
princelets  and  prelates  and  mercenery  generals  in- 
dulged in  every  sensuality,  turned  treachery  into  a 
science  and  violence  into  an  instrument ;  and  some- 
times let  themselves  be  intoxicated  into  mad  lust  and 
ferocity,  as  their  silbjects  were  occasionally  intoxi- 
cated with  mad  austerity  and  mysticism  ;  but  the 
excesses  of  mad  vice,  like  the  excesses  of  mad  virtue, 
lasted  only  a  short  time,  or  lasted  only  in  individual 
saints  or  blood-maniacs  ;  and  the  men  of  the  Renais- 
sance speedily  regained  their  level  of  indifferent 
righteousness  and  of  indifferent  sinfulness.  Righteous- 
ness and  sinfulness  both  passive,  without  power  of 
aggression  or  resistance,  and  consequently  in  strange 
and  dreadful   peace  with    each    other.      The   wicked 


90  EUPHORION. 

men  did  not  dislike  virtue,  nor  the  good  men  vace  : 
the  villain  could  admire  a  saint,  and  the  saint  could 
excuse  a  villain.  The  prudery  of  righteousness  was 
as  unknown  as  the  cynicism  of  evil  ;  the  good  man, 
like  Guarino  da  Verona,  would  not  shrink  from  the 
foul  man  ;  the  foul  man,  like  Beccadelli,  would  not 
despise  the  pure  man.  The  ideally  righteous  citizen 
of  Agnolo  Pandolfini  does  not  interfere  with  the 
ideally  unrighteous  prince  of  Machiavelli  :  each  has 
his  own  position  and  conduct  ;  and  who  can  say 
whether,  if  the  positions  were  exchanged,  the  conduct 
might  not  be  exchanged  also  ?  In  such  a  condition 
of  things  as  this,  evil  ceases  to  appear  monstrous  ;  it 
is  explained,  endured,  condoned.  The  stately  philo- 
sophical historians,  so  stoically  grand,  and  the 
prattling  local  chroniclers,  so  highly  coloured  and  so 
gentle  and  graceful ;  Guicciardini  and  Machiavelli 
and  Valori  and  Segni,  on  the  one  hand — Corio,  Alle- 
gretti,  Matarazzo,  Infessura,  on  the  other ;  all  these, 
from  whom  we  learn  the  real  existence  of  immorality 
far  more  universal  and  abominable  than  our  drama- 
tists venture  to  show,  relate  quietly,  calmly,  with 
analytical  frigidness  or  gossiping  levity,  the  things 
which  we  often  shrink  from  repeating,  and  sometimes 
recoil  from  believing.  Great  statesmanlike  historians 
and  humble  chattering  chroniclers  are  alike  unaffected 
by  what  goes  on  around  them  :  they  collect  anecdotes 
and  generalize  events  without  the  fumes  of  evil,  among 
which  they  seek  for  materials  in   the  dark   places  of 


1 


THE  IT  A  LY  OF  ELIZA  BE  THA  N  DRA  MA  TISTS.     g  i 

national  or  local  history,  ever  going  to  their  imagi- 
nation, ever  making  their  heart  sicken  and  faint,  and 
their  fancy  stagger  and  reel.  The  life  of  these 
righteous,  or  at  least,  not  actively  sinning  men,  may 
be  hampered,  worried,  embittered,  or  even  broken  by 
the  villainy  of  their  fellow-men  ;  but,  except  in  some 
visionary  monk,  life  can  never  be  poisoned  by  the 
mere  knowledge  of  evil.  Their  town  may  be  betrayed 
to  the  enemy,  their  daughters  may  be  dishonoured  or 
poisoned,  their  sons  massacred  ;  they  may,  in  their  old 
age,  be  cast  starving  on  the  world,  or  imprisoned  or 
broken  by  torture  ;  and  they  will  complain  and  be 
fierce  in  diatribe  :  the  fiercest  diatribe  written  against 
any  Pope  of  the  Renaissance  being,  perhaps,  that  of 
Platina  against  Paul  II.,  who  was  a  saint  compared 
with  his  successors  Sixtus  and  Alexander,  because 
the  writer  of  the  diatribe  and  his  friends  were  mal- 
treated by  this  pope.  When  personally  touched,  the 
Italians  of  the  Renaissance  will  brook  no  villainy — the 
poniard  quickly  despatches  sovereigns  like  Galeazzo 
Maria  Sforza  ;  but  when  the  villainy  remains 
abstract,  injures  neither  themselves  nor  their  imme- 
diate surroundings,  it  awakens  no  horror,  and  the 
man  who  commits  it  is  by  no  means  regarded  as  a 
fiend.  The  great  criminals  of  the  Renaissance — 
traitors  and  murderers  like  Lodovico  Sforza,  inces- 
tuous parricides  like  Gianpaolo  Baglioni,  committers 
of  every  iniquity  under  heaven  like  Caesar  Borgia — 
move  through  the  scene  of  Renaissance    history,  as 


92  EUPHORION. 

shown  by  its  writers  great  and  small,  quietly,  serenely, 
triumphantly  ;  with  gracious  and  magnanimous  bear- 
ing ;  applauded,  admired,  or  at  least  endured.  On 
their  passage  no  man,  historian  or  chronicler,  unless 
the  agent  of  a  hostile  political  faction,  rises  up,  con- 
fronts them  and  says,  "This  man  is  a  devil." 

And  devils  these  men  were  not :  the  judgment  of 
their  contemporaries,  morally  completely  perverted, 
was  probably  psychologically  correct;  they  misjudged 
the  deeds,  but  rarely,  perhaps,  misjudged  the  man. 
To  us  moderns,  as  to  our  English  ancestors  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  this  is  scarcely  conceivable.  A  man 
who  does  devilish  deeds  is  of  necessity  a  devil  ;  and 
the  evil  Italian  princes  of  the  Renaissance,  the  Borgias, 
Sforzas,  Baglionis,  Malatestas,  and  Riarios  appear, 
through  the  mist  of  horrified  imagination,  so  many 
uncouth  and  gigantic  monsters,  nightmare  shapes,  less 
like  human  beings  than  like  the  grand  and  frightful 
angels  of  evil  who  gather  round  Milton's  Satan  in  the 
infernal  council.  Such  they  appear  to  us.  But  if  we 
once  succeed  in  calmly  looking  at  them,  seeing  them 
not  in  the  lurid  lights  and  shadows  of  our  fancy,  but 
in  the  daylight  of  contemporary  reality,  we  shall  little 
by  little  be  forced  to  confess  (and  the  confession  is 
horrible)  that  most  of  these  men  are  neither  abnormal 
nor  gigantic.  Their  times  were  monstrous,  not  they. 
They  were  not,  that  is  clear,  at  variance  with  the  moral 
atmosphere  which  surrounded  them  ;  and  they  were 
the  direct  result  of  the  social  and  political  condition. 


THE  ITAL  Y  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     93 

This  may  seem  no  answer  ;  for  although  we  know  the 
causes  of  monster  births,  they  are  monstrous  none  the 
less.  What  I  mean  is  not  that  the  existence  of  men 
capable  of  committing  such  actions  was  normal  ; 
but  that  the  men  who  committed  them,  the  con- 
ditions being  what  they  were,  were  not  necessarily 
men  of  exceptional  character.  The  level  of  immo- 
rality was  so  high  that  a  man  need  be  no  giant  to  reach 
up  into  the  very  seventh  heaven  of  iniquity.  When 
to  massacre  at  a  banquet  a  number  of  enemies  enticed 
by  overtures  of  peace  was  considered  in  Caesar  Borgia 
merely  a  rather  audacious  and  not  very  holy  action, 
indicative  of  very  brilliant  powers  of  diplomacy,  then 
Caesar  Borgia  required,  to  commit  such  an  action, 
little  more  than  a  brilliant  diplomatic  endowment, 
unhampered  by  scruples  and  timidity  ;  when  a  brave, 
and  gracious  prince  like  Gianpaolo  Baglioni  could 
murder  his  kinsmen  and  commit  incest  with  his 
sister  without  being  considered  less  gracious  and 
magnanimous,  then  Gianpaolo  Baglioni  might  indeed 
be  but  an  indifferent  villain  ;  when  treachery,  lust, 
and  bloodshed,  although  objected  to  in  theory,  were 
condoned  in  practice,  and  were  regarded  as  venial 
sins,  those  who  indulged  in  them  might  be  in  fact 
scarcely  more  than  venial  sinners.  In  short,  where  a 
fiendish  action  might  be  committed  without  the  per- 
petrator being  considered  a  fiend,  there  was  no  need 
of  his  being  one.  And,  indeed,  the  great  villains  of 
the  Renaissance  never  take  up  the  attitude  of  fiends  ; 


94  EUPHORION. 

one  or  two^  like  certain  Visconti  or  Aragonese,  were 
madmen,  but  the  others  were  more  or  less  normal 
human  beings.  There  was  no  barrier  between  them 
and  evil ;  they  slipped  into  it,  remained  in  it,  became 
accustomed  to  it  ;  but  a  vicious  determination  to  be 
wicked,  a  feeling  of  the  fiend  within  one,  like  that  of 
Shakespeare's  Richard,  or  a  gradual,  conscious  irresis- 
tible absorption  into  recognized  iniquity  like  Macbeth's, 
there  was  not.  The  mere  sense  of  absolute  power 
and  impunity,  together  with  the  complete  silence  of 
the  conscience  of  the  public  at  large,  can  make  a  man 
do  strange  things.  If  Ctesar  Borgia  be  free  to  practise 
his  archery  upon  hares  and  deer,  why  should  he  not 
practise  it  upon  these  prisoners  ?  Who  will  blame 
him  ?  Who  can  prevent  him  ?  If  he  had  for  his 
mistress  every  woman  he  might  single  out  from 
among  his  captives,  why  not  his  sister }  If  he  have 
the  force  to  carry  out  a  plan,  why  should  a  man  stand 
in  his  way  }  The  complete  facility  in  the  commission 
of  all  actions  quickly  brings  such  a  man  to  the  limits 
of  the  legitimate  :  there  is  no  universal  cry  to  tell  him 
where  those  limits  are,  no  universal  arm  to  pull  him 
back.  He  pooh-poohs,  pushes  them  a  little  further, 
and  does  the  iniquity.  Nothing  prevents  his  grati- 
fying his  ambition,  his  avarice,  and  his  lust;  so  he 
gratifies  them.  Soon,  seeking  for  further  gratification, 
he  has  to  cut  new  paths  in  villainy  :  he  has  not  been 
restrained  by  man, who  is  silent;  he  is  soon  restrained 
no  longer  by   nature,  whose  only  voice  is  in   man's 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABE THAN  DRA MA  TISTS.    95 

conscience.  Pleasure  in  wanton  cruelty  takes  the 
same  course  :  he  prefers  to  throw  javelins  at  men  and 
women  to  throwing  javelins  at  bulls  or  bears,  even  as 
he  prefers  throwing  javelins  at  bulls  or  bear's  rather 
than  at  targets;  the  excitement  is  greater;  the  instinct 
is  that  of  the  soldiers  of  Spain  and  of  France,  who 
invariably  preferred  shooting  at  a  valuable  fresco  like 
Sodoma's  Christ,  at  Siena,  or  Lo  Spagna's  Madonna, 
at  Spoleto,  to  practising  against  a  mere  worthless 
piece  of  wood.  Such  a  man  as  Csesar  Borgia  is  the 
ne  phis  ultra  of  a  Renaissance  villain  ;  he  takes,  as 
all  do  not,  absolute  pleasure  in  evil  as  such.  Yet 
Caesar  Borgia  is  not  a  fiend  nor  a  maniac.  He  can 
restrain  himself  whenever  circumstances  or  policy 
require  it  ;  he  can  be  a  wise  administrator,  a  just 
judge.  His  portraits  show  no  degraded  criminal  ;  he 
is,  indeed,  a  criminal  in  action,  but  not  necessarily  a 
criminal  in  constitution,  this  fiendish  man  who  did 
not  seem  a  fiend  to  Machiavel.  We  are  astonished  at 
the  strange  anomaly  in  the  tastes  and  deeds  of  these 
Renaissance  villains  ;  we  are  amazed  before  their 
portraits.  These  men,  who,  in  the  frightful  light  of 
their  own  misdeeds,  appear  to  us  as  complete  demons 
or  complete  madmen,  have  yet  much  that  is  amiable 
and  much  that  is  sane  ;  they  stickle  at  no  abominable 
lust,  yet  they  are  no  bestial  sybarites ;  they  are  brave, 
sober,  frugal,  enduring  like  any  puritan  ;  they  are 
treacherous,  rapacious,  cruel,  utterly  indifferent  to  the 
sufferings    of    their   enemies,  yet  they   are   gentle  in 


96  EUPHORION. 

manner,  passionately  fond  of  letters  and  art,  superb 
in  their  works  of  public  utility,  and  not  incapable  of 
genuinely  admiring  men  of  pure  life  like  Bernardino 
or  Savonarola :  they  are  often,  strange  to  say,  like  the 
frightful  Baglionis  of  Perugia,  passionately  admired 
and  loved  by  their  countrymen.  The  bodily  portraits 
of  these  men,  painted  by  the  sternly  realistic  art  of  the 
fifteenth  and  early  sixteenth  centuries,  are  even  more 
confusing  to  our  ideas  than  their  moral  portraits  drawn 
by  historians  and  chroniclers.  Caesar  Borgia,  with  his 
long  fine  features  and  noble  head,  is  a  gracious  and 
refined  prince  ;  there  is,  perhaps,  a  certain  duplicity  in 
the  well-cut  lips  ;  the  beard,  worn  full  and  peaked  in 
Spanish  fashion,  forms  a  sort  of  mask  to  the  lower 
part  of  the  face,  but  what  we  see  is  noble  and  intellec- 
tual. Sigismondo  Malatesta  has  on  his  medals  a  head 
whose  scowl  has  afforded  opportunity  for  various  fine 
descriptions  of  a  blood  maniac  ;  but  the  head,  thus 
found  so  expressive,  of  this  monster,  is  yet  more 
human  than  the  head  on  the  medals  of  Lionello 
d'Este,  one  of  the  most  mild  and  cultivated  of 
the  decently  behaved  Ferrarese  princes.  The  very 
flower  of  precocious  iniquity,  the  young  Baglionis, 
Vitellis,  and  Orsinis,  grouped  round  Signorelli's 
preaching  Antichrist  at  Orvieto,  are,  in  their  gallantly 
trimmed  jerkins  and  jewelled  caps,  the  veriest  assem- 
blage of  harmless  young  dandies,  pretty  and  insipid  ; 
we  can  scarcely  believe  that  these  mild  beardless 
striplings,  tight-waisted  and  well-curled  lilce  girls  of 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.     97 

sixteen,  are  the  terrible  Umbrian  brigand  condottieri 
— Gianpaolos,  Simonettos,  Vitellozzos,  and  Astorres — 
whose  abominable  deeds  fill  the  pages  of  the  chronicles 
of  Matarazzo,  of  Frolliere,  and  of  Monaldeschi.  No- 
where among  the  portraits  of  Renaissance  monsters  do 
we  meet  with  anything  like  those  Roman  emperors, 
whose  frightful  effigies,  tumid,  toad-like  Vitelliuses 
or  rage-convulsed  Caracallas,  fill  all  our  museums 
in  marble  or  bronze  or  loathsome  purple  porphyry  ; 
such  types  as  these  are  as  foreign  to  the  reality  of  the 
Italian  Renaissance  as  are  the  Brachianos  and  Lus- 
suriosos,  the  Pieros  and  Corombonas,  to  the  Italian 
fiction  of  the  sixteenth  centur}-. 

Nor  must  such  anomalies  between  the  type  of  the 
men  and  their  deeds,  between  their  abominable 
crimes  and  their  high  qualities,  be  made  a  mere 
subject  for  grandiloquent  disquisition.  The  man  of 
the  Renaissance,  as  we  have  said,  had  no  need  to  be 
a  monster  to  do  monstrous  things  ;  a  crime  did  not 
necessitate  such  a  moral  rebellion  as  requires  complete 
unity  of  nature,  unmixed  wickedness  ;  it  did  not 
precipitate  a  man  for  ever  into  a  moral  abyss  where 
no  good  could  ever  enter.  Seeing  no  barrier  between 
the  legitimate  and  the  illegitimate,  he  could  alternate 
almost  unconsciously  between  them.  He  was  never 
shut  out  from  evil,  and  never  shut  out  from  good  ; 
the  judgment  of  men  did  not  dress  him  in  a  convict's 
jacket  which  made  evil  his  only  companion  ;  it  did 
not  lock  him   up  in  a  moral  dungeon  where  no  ray 


93  EUPHORION. 

of  righteousness  could  penetrate ;  he  was  not  con- 
demned, like  the  branded  harlot,  to  hopeless  infamy- 
He  need  be  bad  only  as  much  and  as  long  as  he  chose* 
Hence,  on  the  part  of  the  evil-doer  of  the  Renaissance, 
no  necessit}-  either  for  violent  rebellion  or  for  sincere 
repentance  ;  hence  the  absence  of  all  characters  such 
as  the  tragic  writer  seeks,  developed  by  moral  struggle, 
warped  by  the  triumph  of  vice,  or  consciously  soiled 
in  virtue.  What  a  "  Revenger's  Tragedy  "  might  not 
Cyril  Tourneur  have  made,  had  he  known  all  the 
details,  of  the  story  of  Alessandro  de'  Medici's  death  I 
What  a  Vindici  he  would  have  made  of  the  murderer 
Lorenzino  ;  with  what  a  strange  lurid  grandeur  he 
would  have  surrounded  the  plottings  of  the  pander 
Brutus.  But  Lorenzino  de'  Medici  had  none  of  the 
feeling  of  Tourneur's  Vindici ;  there  was  in  him 
none  of  the  ghastly  spirit  of  self-immolation  of  the 
hero  of  Tourneur  in  his  attendance  upon  the  foul 
creature  v.'hom  he  leads  to  his  death.  Lorenzino  had 
the  usual  Brutus  mania  of  his  day,  but  unmixed  with 
horror.  To  be  the  pander  and  jester  of  the  Duke 
was  no  pain  to  his  nature  ;  there  was  probably  no 
sense  of  debasement  in  the  knowledge  either  of  his 
employer  or  of  his  employment.  To  fasten  on  Alex- 
ander, to  pretend  to  be  his  devoted  slave  and  server 
of  his  lust,  this  piece  of  loathsome  acting,  merely 
enhanced,  by  the  ingenuity  it  required,  the  attraction 
of  what  to  Lorenzino  was  an  act  of  heroism.  His 
ambition  was  to  be  a  Brutus ;  that  he  had  bespattered 


J 


THE  ITALY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS.    99 

the  part  probably  never  occurred  to  him.  Indiffer- 
ence to  good  and  evil  permitted  the  men  of  the 
Renaissance  to  mix  the  two  without  any  moral  sick- 
ness, as  it  permitted  them  to  alternate  them  without 
a  moral  struggle.  Such  is  the  wickedness  of  the 
Renaissance :  not  a  superhuman  fury  of  lust  and 
cruelty,  like  Victor  Hugo's  Lucrezia  Borgia  ;  but  an 
indifferent,  a  characterless  creature  like  the  Lucrezia 
Borgia  of  history  :  passive  to  surrounding  influences, 
blind  to  good  and  evil,  infamous  in  the  infamous 
Rome,  among  her  father  and  brother's  courtesans 
and  cut-throats  ;  grave  and  gracious  in  the  grave  and 
gracious  Ferrara,  among  the  Platonic  poets  and  pacific 
courtiers  of  the  court  of  the  Estensi.  Thus,  in  the 
complete  prose  and  colourlessness  of  reality,  has  the 
evil  of  the  Renaissance  been  understood  and  repre- 
sented only  by  one  man,  and  transmitted  to  us  in  one 
pale  and  delicate  psychological  masterpiece  far  more 
loathsome  than  any  elaborately  hideous  monster 
painting  by  Marston  or  Tourneur.  This  man  who 
conceived  the  horrors  of  the  Italian  Renaissance 
in  the  spirit  in  which  they  were  committed  is  Ford. 
In  his  great  play  he  has  caught  the  very  tone  of  the 
Italian  Renaissance  :  the  abominableness  of  the  play 
consisting  not  in  the  coarse  slaughter  scenes  added 
merely  to  please  the  cockpit  of  an  English  theatre, 
but  in  the  superficial  innocence  of  tone  ;  in  its  making 
evil  lose  its  appearance  of  evil,  even  as  it  did  to  the 
men  of  the   Renaissance.     Giovanni   and   Annabella 


itDO  EUPHORION. 

make  love  as  if  they  were  Romeo  and  Juliet :  there 
is  scarcely  any  struggle,  and  no  remorse ;  they  weep 
and  pay  compliments  and  sigh  and  melt  in  true 
Aminta  style.  There  is  in  the  love  of  the  brother 
and  sister  neither  the  ferocious  heat  of  tragic  lust, 
nor  the  awful  shudder  of  unnatural  evil ;  they  are 
lukewarm,  neither  good  nor  bad.  Their  abominable 
love  is  in  their  own  eyes  a  mere  weakness  of  the 
flesh  ;  there  is  no  sense  of  revolt  against  man  and 
nature  and  God  ;  they  are  neither  dragged  on  by 
irresistible  demoniac  force  nor  held  back  by  the  grip 
of  conscience  ;  they  slip  and  slide,  even  like  Francesca 
and  Paolo.  They  pay  each  other  sweet  and  mawkish 
compliments.  The  ferocious  lust  of  Francesco  Cenci 
is  moral  compared  with  the  way  in  which  the  "  trim 
youth "  Giovanni  praises  Annabella's  beauty ;  the 
blushing,  bride-like  way  in  which  Annabella,  "white  in 
her  soul,"  acknowledges  her  long  love.  The  atro- 
ciousness  of  all  this  is,  that  if  you  strike  out  a  word 
or  two  the  scene  may  be  read  with  perfect  moral 
satisfaction,  with  the  impression  that  this  is  really 
"  sacred  love."  For  in  these  scenes  Ford  wrote  with 
a  sweetness  and  innocence  truly  diabolical,  not  a 
shiver  of  horror  passing  through  him — serene,  uncon- 
scious ;  handling  the  filthy  without  sense  of  its  being 
unclean,  to  the  extent,  the  incredible  extent,  of 
making  Giovanni  and  Annabella  swear  on  their 
mother's  ashes  eternal  fidelity  in  incest :  horror  of 
horrors,  to  which  no  Walpurgis   Night  abomination 


THE  ITALY  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS.  loi 

could  ever  approach,  this  taking  as  witness  of  the  un- 
utterable, not  an  obscene  Beelzebub  with  abominable 
words  and  rites,  but  the  very  holiest  of  holies.  If  ever 
Englishman  approached  the  temper  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance,  it  was  not  Tourneur,  nor  Shelley  with  his 
cleansing  hell  fires  of  tragic  horror,  but  this  sweet  and 
gentle  Ford.  If  ever  an  artistic  picture  approached 
the  reality  of  such  a  man  as  Gianpaolo  Baglioni,  the 
incestuous  murderer  whom  the  Frolliere  chronicler, 
enthusiastic  like  Matarazzo,  admires,  for  "his  most 
beautiful  person,  his  benign  and  amiable  manner  and 
lordly  bearing,"  it  is  certainly  not  the  elaborately 
villainous  Francesco  Cenci  of  Shelley,  boasting  like 
another  Satan  of  his  enormous  wickedness,  exhausting 
in  his  picture  of  himself  the  rhetoric  of  horror,  com- 
mitting his  final  enormity  merely  to  complete  the 
crown  of  atrocities  in  which  he  glories  ;  it  is  no  such 
tragic  impossibility  of  moral  hideousness  as  this  ;  it 
is  the  Giovanni  of  Ford,  the  pearl  of  virtuous  and 
studious  youths,  the  spotless,  the  brave,  who,  after  a 
moment's  reasoning,  tramples  on  a  vulgar  prejudice — 
"  Shall  a  peevish  sound,  a  customary  form  from  man 
to  man,  of  brother  and  of  sister,  be  a  bar  'twixt  my 
eternal  happiness  and  me  ?  "  who  sins  with  a  clear  con- 
science, defies  the  world,  and  dies,  bravely,  proudly, 
the  "  sacred  name  "  of  Annabella  on  his  lips,  like  a 
chivalrous  hero.  The  pious,  pure  Germany  of  Luther 
will  give  the  world  the  tragic  type  of  the  science- 
damned   Faustus  ;    the  devout  and  savage  Spain  ot 


I02  EUPHORION. 

Loyola  will  give  the  tragic  type  of  Don  Juan 
damned  for  mockery  of  man  and  of  death  and  of 
heaven  ;  the  Puritan  England  of  Milton  will  give  the 
most  sublimely  tragic  type  of  all,  the  awful  figure  of 
him  who  says,  "  Evil,  be  thou  my  good."  What  tragic 
type  can  this  evil  Italy  of  Renaissance  give  to  the 
world  ?  None  :  or  at  most  this  miserable,  morbid, 
compassionated  Giovanni ;  whom  Ford  would  have 
us  admire,  and  whom  we  can  only  dispise. 

The  blindness  to  evil  which  constitutes  the  crimi- 
nality of  the  Renaissance  is  such  as  to  give  it  almost 
an  air  of  innocence.  For  the  men  of  that  time 
were  wicked  solely  from  a  complete  sophistication 
of  ideas,  a  complete  melting  away  (owing  to  slowly 
operating  political  and  intellectual  tendencies)  of  all 
moral  barriers.  They  walked  through  the  paths  of 
wickedness  serenely  as  they  would  have  trod  the  ways 
of  righteousness  ;  seeing  no  boundary,  exercising 
their  psychic  limbs  equally  in  the  open  and  permitted 
spaces  and  in  the  forbidden.  They  plucked  the  fruit 
of  evil  without  a  glance  behind  them,  without  a 
desperate  setting  of  their  teeth  ;  plucked  it  openly, 
calmly,  as  they  would  have  plucked  the  blackberries 
in  the  hedge  ;  bit  into  it,  ate  it,  with  perfect  ease 
and  serenity,  saying  their  prayers  before  and  after, 
as  if  it  were  their  natural  daily  bread  mentioned 
in  the  Lord's  Prayer ;  no  grimace  or  unseemly 
leer  the  while  ;  no  moral  indigestion  or  nightmare 
(except    very    rarely)    in    consequence.     Hence   the 


THE  ITAL  Y  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.  103 

serenity  of  their  literature  and  art.  These  men  and 
women  of  the  ItaHan  Renaissance  have,  in  their 
portraits,  a  very  pleasing  nobility  of  aspect :  serene, 
thoughtful,  healthy,  benign.  Titian's  courtesans  are 
our  archet}'pes  of  dignified  womanhood  ;  we  might 
fancy  Portia  or  Isabella  with  such  calm,  florid  beauty, 
so  v/holly  unmeretricious  and  uncankered.  The 
humanists  and  priests  who  lie  outstretched  on  the 
acanthus-garlanded  sarcophagi  by  Desiderio  and 
Rossellino  are  the  very  flowers  of  refined  and  gentle 
men  of  study  ;  the  youths  in  Botticelli's  "  Adoration 
of  The  Magi,"  for  instance,  are  the  ideal  of  Boiardo's 
chivalry,  Rinaldos  and  Orlandos  every  one  ;  the 
corseleted  generals  of  the  Renaissance,  so  calm  and 
stern  and  frank,  the  Bartolomeo  Colleoni  of  Ver- 
rocchio,  the  Gattamelata  by  Giorgione  (or  Giorgione's 
pupilj,  look  fit  to  take  up  the  banner  of  the  crusade  : 
that  Gattamelata  in  the  Uffizi  gallery  especially 
looks  like  a  sort  of  military  jNIilton  :  give  him  a  pair 
of  wings  and  he  becomes  at  once  Signorelli's  arch- 
angel, clothed  in  heavenly  steel  and  unsheathing 
the  flaming  sword  of  God.  Compare  with  these 
types  Holbein's  courtiers  of  Henry  VHI. ;  what 
scrofulous  hogs  !  Compare  Sanchez  Coello's  Philip 
n.  and  Don  Carlos  ;  what  monomaniacs  !  Compare 
even  Diirer's  magnificent  head  ofWillibald  Pirkheimer: 
how  the  swine  nature  is  blended  with  the  thinker. 
And  the  swine  will  be  subdued,  the  thinker  will 
triumph.     Why  >     Just  because  there  is  a  contest — 


I04  EUPHORION. 

because  the  thinker- Willibald  is  conscious  of  the 
swine-Willibald.  In  this  coarse,  brutal,  deeply  stained 
Germany  of  the  time  of  Luther,  affording  Diirer  and 
Holbein,  alas  !  how  many  besotten  and  bestial  types, 
there  will  arise  a  great  conflict :  the  obscene  leering 
Death — Death-in-Life  as  he  really  is — will  skulk 
everywhere,  even  as  in  the  prints  of  the  day,  hideous 
and  powerful,  trying,  with  hog's  snout,  to  drive  Christ 
Himself  out  of  limbo  ;  but  he  is  known,  seen,  dreaded. 
The  armed  knight  of  Diirer  turns  away  from  his 
grimacings,  and  urges  on  his  steel-covered  horse.  He 
visits  even  the  best,  even  Luther  in  the  Wartburg  ; 
but  the  good  men  open  their  Bibles,  cry  "  Vade  retro  ! " 
and  throw  their  inkstands  at  him,  showing  themselves 
terrified  and  ruffled  after  the  combat.  And  these 
Germans  of  Luther's  are  disgustingly  fond  of  blood 
and  horrors  :  they  like  to  see  the  blood  spirt  from  the 
decapitated  trunk,  to  watch  its  last  contortions  ;  they 
hammer  with  a  will  (in  Durer's  "  Passion  ")  the  nails 
of  the  cross,  they  peel  off  strips  of  skin  in  the  flagella- 
tion. But  then  they  can  master  all  that ;  they  can  be 
pure,  charitable  ;  they  have  gentleness  for  the  hare 
and  the  rabbit,  like  Luther  ;  they  kneel  piously  before 
the  cross-bearing  stag,  like  Saint  Hubert.  Not  so  the 
Italians.  They  rarely  or  never  paint  horrors,  or  death, 
or  abominations.  Their  flagellated  Christ,  their  arrow- 
riddled  Sebastian,  never  writhe  or  howl  with  pain  ; 
indeed,  they  suffer  none.  Judith,  in  Mantegna's  print, 
puts  the  head  of  Holophernes  into  her  bag  with  the 


THE  IT  A  LV  OF  EL  IZABE  THA  N  BRA  MA  TISTS.  105 

serenity  of  a  muse  ;  and  the  head  is  quite  clean, 
without  loathsome  drippings  or  torn  depending  strings 
of  muscle  ;  unconvulsed,  a  sort  of  plaster  cast.  The 
tragedy  of  Christ,  the  tragedy  of  Judith  ;  the  physical 
agony  shadowing  the  moral  agony  ;  the  awfulness  of 
victim  and  criminal — the  whole  tragic  meaning  was 
unknown  to  the  light  and  cheerful  contemporaries  of 
Ariosto,  to  the  cold  and  c}-nical  contemporaries  of 
Machiavelli. 

The  tragic  passion  and  imagination  which,  in  the 

noble  and  grotesque  immaturity  of  the  Middle  Ages, 

had    murmured    confusedly  in  such    popular  legends 

as    gave    to    Ezzelin    the    Fiend    for   a   father,   and 

Death  and  Sin  for  adversaries  at   dice  ;    which   had 

stammered    awkwardly    but   grandly   in    the   school 

Latin  of  Mussato's  tragedy  of  "  Eccerinis  ; "  which  had 

wept  and  storm.ed  and  imprecated  and  laughed  for 

horror  in  the  infinite  tragedy — pathetic,  grand,  and 

grotesque,   like   all   great   tragedy — of  Dante  ;    this 

tragic   passion    and    imagination,   this   sense   of   the 

horrible  and  the  terrible,  had   been  forfeited  by  the 

Italy  of  the  Renaissance,  lost  with  its  sense  of  right 

and  wrong.     The  Italian  Renaissance,  supreme  in  the 

arts  which  require  a  subtle  and  strong  perception  of 

the  excellence  of  mere  lines  and  colours  and  lights 

and  shadows,  which  demand  unflinching  judgment  of 

material  qualities ;  was  condemned  to  inferiority  in  the 

art  which  requires  subtle  and  strong  perception  of  the 

excellence  of  human  emotion  and  action  ;  in  the  art 


io6  EUPHORION. 

which  demands  unflinching  judgment  of  moral  motives. 
The  tragic  spirit  is  the  offspring  of  the  conscience  of 
a  people.  The  sense  of  the  imaginative  grandeur  of 
evil  may  perhaps  be  a  forerunner  of  demoralization  ; 
but  such  a  sense  of  wonder  and  awe,  such  an  imagina- 
tive fascination  of  the  grandly,  superhumanly  wicked  ; 
such  a  necessity  to  magnify  a  villain  into  a  demon 
with  archangelic  splendour  of  power  of  evil,  can  exist 
only  in  minds  pure  and  strong,  braced  up  to  virtue, 
virgin  of  evil,  with  a  certain  childlike  power  of  wonder  ; 
minds  to  whom  it  appears  that  to  be  wicked  requires 
a  powerful  rebellion  ;  minds  accustomed  to  nature  and 
nature's  plainness,  to  whom  the  unnatural  can  be  no 
subject  of  sophistication  and  cynicism,  but  only  of 
wonder.  While,  in  Italy,  Giraldi  Cinthio  prattles  off 
to  a  gay  party  of  ladies  and  gentlemen  stories  of 
murder  and  lust  as  frightful  as  those  of  "  Titus  An- 
dronicus,"  of  "  Giovanni  and  Annabella,"  and  of  the 
"  Revenger's  Tragedy,"  in  the  intelligent,  bantering 
tone  in  which  he  tells  his  Decameronian  tales ; 
in  England,  Marston,  in  his  superb  prologue  to  the 
second  part  of  "Antonio  and  Mellida,"  doubts 
whether  all  his  audience  can  rise  to  the  conception  of 
the  terrible  passions  he  wishes  to  display : 

If  any  spirit  breathes  within  this  round 
Uncapable  of  weighty  passion, 
Who  winks  and  shuts  his  apprehension  up 
From  common  sense  of  what  men  were  and  are, 
Who  would  not  know  what  men  must  be  :  let  such 
Hurry  amain  from  our  black  visaged  shows  ; 
We  shall  affright  their  eyes. 


i 


THE  ITAL  V  OF  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMA  TISTS.  107 

The  great  criminals  of  Italy  were  unconscious  of  being 
criminals  ;  the  nation  was  unconscious  of  being  sinful. 
Bembo's  sonnets  were  the  fit  reading  for  Lucrezia 
Borgia ;  pastorals  by  Guarini  the  dramatic  amusements 
of  Rannuccio  Farnesi  ;  if  Vittoria  Accoramboni  and 
Francesco  Cenci  read  anything  besides  their  prayer- 
book  or  ribald  novels,  it  was  some  sugary  "  Aminta"  or 
"  Pastor  Fido  : "  their  own  tragedies  by  Webster  and 
Shelley  they  could  never  have  understood. 

And  thus  the  Italians  of  the  Renaissance  walked 
placidly  through  the  evil  which  surrounded  them  ;  for 
them,  artists  and  poets,  the  sky  was  always  blue  and 
the  sun  always  bright,  and  their  art  and  their  poetry 
were  serene.  But  the  Englishmen  of  the  sixteenth 
■century  were  astonished  and  fascinated  by  the  evil  of 
Italy  :  the  dark  pools  of  horror,  the  dabs  of  infamy 
which  had  met  them  ever  and  anon  in  the  brilliant 
southern  cities,  haunted  them  like  nightmare,  be- 
spattered for  them  the  clear  blue  sky,  and  danced, 
black  and  horrible  spots,  before  the  face  of  the  sun. 
The  remembrance  of  Italian  wickedness  weighed  on 
them  like  an  incubus,  clung  to  them  with  a  frightful 
fascination.  While  the  foulest  criminals  of  Italy  dis- 
cussed the  platonic  vapidnesses  of  Bembo's  sonnets, 
and  wept  at  the  sweet  and  languid  lamentations  of 
■Guarini's  shepherds  and  nymphs  ;  the  strong  English- 
men of  the  time  of  Shakespeare,  the  men  whose 
•children  were  to  unsheathe  under  Cromwell  the  sword 
»of  righteousness,  listened  awe-stricken  and  fascinated 


io8  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

with  horror  to  the  gloomy  and  convulsed,  the  grand 
and  frightful  plays  of  Webster  and  of  Tourneur.  And 
the  sin  of  the  Renaissance,  which  the  art  of  Italy  could 
neither  pourtray  nor  perceive  ;  appeared  on  the  stage 
decked  in  superb  and  awful  garb  by  the  tragic  imagi- 
nation of  Elizabethan  England. 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY. 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY. 


The  thought  of  winter  is  bleak  and  barren  to  our 
mind  ;  the  late  year  is  chary  of  aesthetic  as  of  all 
other  food.  In  the  country  it  does  not  bring  ugli- 
ness ;  but  it  terribly  reduces  and  simplifies  things, 
depriving  them  of  two-thirds  of  their  beauty.  In 
sweeping  away  the  last  yellow  leaves,  the  last  crimson 
clouds,  and  in  bleaching  the  last  green  grass,  it 
effaces  a  whole  wealth  of  colour.  It  deprives  us  still 
more  by  actually  diminishing  the  number  of  forms  : 
fo\~  what  summer  had  left  rich,  various,  complex, 
winter  reduces  to  blank  uniformity.  There  is  a  whole 
world  of  lovel}-  things,  shapes  and  tints,  effects  of 
light,  colour,  and  perspective  in  a  wood,  as  long  as  it 
is  capriciously  divided  into  a  thousand  nooks  and 
crannies  by  projecting  boughs,  bushes,  hedges,  and 
hanging  leaves ;  and  this  winter  clears  away  and 
reduces  to  a  Haussmanized  simplicity  of  plan.  There 
is  a  smaller  world,  yet  one  quite  big  enough  for  a  sum- 
mer's day,  in  any  hay  field,  among  the  barren  oats,  the 


3  12  EUPHORION. 

moon-daisies,  the  seeded  grasses,  the  sorrel,  the  butter- 
cups, all  making  at  a  distance  a  wonderful  blent  effect 
of  luminous  brown  and  lilac  and  russet  foamed  with 
white  ;  and  forming,  when  you  look  close  into  it, 
an  unlimited  forest  of  delicately  separate  stems  and 
bloom  and  seed  ;  every  plant  detaching  itself  daintily 
from  an  undefinable  background  of  things  like  itself. 
This  winter  turns  into  a  rusty  brown  and  green  ex- 
panse, or  into  a  bog,  or  a  field  of  frozen  upturned 
clods.  The  very  trees,  stripped  of  their  leaves,  look 
as  if  prepared  for  diagrams  of  the  abstraction  tree. 
Everything,  in  short,  is  reduced  most  philosophically 
to  its  absolutely  ultimate  elements  ;  and  beauty  is  got 
rid  of  almost  as  completely  as  by  a  metaphysical 
definition.  This  aesthetic  barrenness  of  winter  is  most 
of  all  felt  in  southern  climates,  to  which  winter  brings 
none  of  the  harsh  glitter  and  glamour  of  snow  and 
ice  ;  leaving  the  frozen  earth  and  leafless  trees  merely 
bare,  without  the  crisp  sheen  of  snow,  the  glint  and 
glimmer  of  frost  and  icicles,  forming  for  the  denuded 
rigging  of  branches  a  fantastic  system  of  ropes  and 
folded  sails.  In  the  South,  therefore,  unless  you 
go  where  winter  never  comes,  and  autumn  merely 
merges  into  a  lengthened  spring,  winter  is  more  than 
ever  negative,  dreary,  barren  to  our  fancy.  Yet 
even  this  southern  winter  gives  one  very  lovely 
things  :  things  which  one  scarcely  notices  perhaps, 
yet  which  would  baffle  the  most  skilled  painter  to 
imitate,   the   most   skilled    poet   to    describe.     Thus, 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  113 

for  instance,  there  is  a  peculiar  kind  of  morning  by  no 
means  uncommon  in  Tuscany  in  what  is  completely 
winter,  not  a  remnant  of  autumn  or  a  beginning  of 
spring.  It  is  cold,  but  windless  ;  the  sky  full  of  sun,  the 
earth  full  of  mist.  Sun  and  mist  uniting  into  a  pale 
luminousness  in  which  all  things  lose  body,  become 
mere  outline  ;  bodiless  hills  taking  shape  where  they 
touch  the  sky  with  their  curve  ;  clear  bodiless  line  of 
irregular  houses,  of  projecting  ilex  roundings  and 
pointed  cypresses  marking  the  separation  between  hill 
and  sky,  the  one  scarcely  more  solid,  corporeal  than 
the  other  ;  the  hill  almost  as  blue  as  the  sky,  the  sky 
almost  as  vaporous  as  the  hill  ;  the  tangible  often 
more  ghostlike  than  the  intangible.  But  the  sun 
has  smitten  the  higher  hills,  and  the  vapours  have 
partially  rolled  down,  in  a  scarcely  visible  fold,  to 
their  feet ;  and  the  high  hill,  not  yet  rock  or  earth, 
swells  up  into  the  sky  as  something  real,  but  fluid  and 
of  infinite  elasticity.  All  in  front  the  plain  is  white 
with  mist ;  or  pinkish  grey  with  the  unseen  agglo- 
meration of  bare  tree  boughs  and  trunks,  of  sere  field  ; 
till,  nearer  us,  the  trees  become  more  visible,  the 
short  vinebearing  elms  in  the  fields,  interlacing  their 
branches  compressed  by  distance ;  the  clumps  of  pop- 
lars, so  scant  and  far  between  from  near,  so  serried 
and  compact  from  afar  ;  and  between  them  an  occa- 
sional flush,  a  tawny  vapour  of  the  orange  twigged 
osiers  ;  and  then,  still  nearer,  the  expanse  of  sere 
field,  of  mottled,  crushed-together,  yellowed  grass  and 

9 


114  EUPHORION. 

grey  brown  leaves ;  things  of  the  summer  which 
winter  is  burying  to  make  room  for  spring.  Along 
the  reaches  of  the  river  the  clumps  of  leafless  poplars 
are  grey  against  the  pale,  palest  blue  sky  ;  grey  but 
with  a  warmth  of  delicate  brown,  almost  of  rosiness. 
Grey  also  is  the  shingle  in  the  river  bed  ;  the  river  it- 
self either  (if  after  rain)  pale  brown,  streaked  with  pale 
blue  sky  reflections ;  or  (after  a  drought),  low,  grey, 
luminous  throughout  its  surface,  you  might  think, 
were  it  not  that  the  metallic  sheen,  the  vacillating 
sparkles  of  where  the  sun,  smiting  down,  frets  it  into 
a  shifting  mass  of  scintillating  facets,  gives  you  the 
impression  that  this  other  luminousness  of  silvery 
water  must  be  dull  and  dead.  And,  looking  up  the 
river,  it  gradually  disappears,  its  place  marked  only, 
against  the  all-pervading  pale  blue  haze,  by  the 
brownish  grey  spectre  of  the  furthest  poplar  clumps. 

This,  I  have  said,  is  an  effect  which  winter  pro- 
duces, nay,  even  a  southern  winter,  with  those  com- 
paratively few  and  slight  elements  at  its  disposal. 
We  see  it,  notice  it,  and  enjoy  its  delicate  loveliness  ; 
but  while  so  doing  we  do  not  think,  or  we  forget,  that 
the  habit  of  noticing,  nay,  the  power  of  perceiving 
such  effects  as  this,  is  one  of  those  habits  and  powers 
which  we  possess,  so  to  speak,  only  since  yesterday. 
The  possibility  of  reproducing  in  painting  effects  like 
this  one  ;  or,  more  truthfully,  the  wish  to  reproduce 
them,  is  scarcely  as  old  as  our  own  century ;  it  is, 
perhaps,  the  latest  born  of  all  our  artistic  wishes  and 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  115 

possibilities.  But  the  possibility  of  any  visible  effect 
being  perceived  and  reproduced  by  the  painter,  usually 
precedes — at  least  where  any  kind  of  pictorial  art 
already  exists — the  perception  of  such  effects  by  those 
who  are  not  painters,  and  the  attempt  to  reproduce 
them  by  means  of  words.  We  do  not  care  to  admit 
that  our  grandfathers  were  too  unlike  ourselves,  lest 
ourselves  should  be  found  too  unlike  our  grand- 
children. We  hold  to  the  metaphysic  fiction  of  man 
having  always  been  the  same,  and  only  his  circum- 
stances having  changed  ;  not  admitting  that  the  very 
change  of  circumstances  implies  something  new  in  the 
man  who  altered  them  ;  and  similarly  we  shrink  from 
the  thought  of  the  many  things  which  we  used  never 
to  notice,  and  which  it  has  required  a  class  of  men 
endowed  with  special  powers  of  vision  to  find  out, 
copy,  and  teach  us  to  see  and  appreciate.  Yet  there 
is  scarcely  one  of  us  who  has  not  a  debt  towards  some 
painter  or  writer  for  first  directing  his  attention  to 
objects  or  effects  which  may  have  abounded  around 
him,  but  unnoticed  or  confused  with  others.  The 
painters,  as  I  have  said,  the  men  who  see  more  keenly 
and  who  study  what  they  have  seen,  naturally  come 
first ;  nor  does"  the  poet  usually  describe  what  his 
contemporary  painter  attempts  not  to  paint.  An  ex- 
ception might,  perhaps,  require  to  be  made  for  Dante, 
who  would  seem  to  have  seen  and  described  many 
things  left  quite  untouched  by  Giotto,  and  even  by 
Raphael ;  but  in  estimating  Dante  we  must  be  careful 


ii6  EUPHORION. 

to  distinguish  the  few  touches  which  really  belong  to 
him,  from  the  great  mass  of  colour  and  detail  which  we 
have  unconsciously  added  thereto,  borrowing  from  our 
own  experience  and  from  innumerable  pictures  and 
poems  which,  at  the  moment,  we  may  not  in  the  least 
remember  ;  and  having  done  so,  we  shall  be  led  to 
believe  that  those  words  which  suggest  to  us  so  clear 
and  coloured  a  vision  of  scenes  often  complex  and  un- 
common, presented  to  his  own  mind  only  a  compara- 
tively simple  and  incomplete  idea  :  the  atmospheric 
effects,  requiring  a  more  modern  painter  than  Turner, 
which  we  read  between  the  lines  of  the  "  Inferno  "  and 
the  "  Purgatorio,"  most  probably  existed  as  little  for 
Dante  as  they  did  for  Giotto ;  the  poet  seeing  and 
describing  in  reality  only  salient  forms  of  earth  and 
rock,  monotonous  in  tint  and  deficient  in  air,  like  those 
in  the  backgrounds  of  mediaeval  Tuscan  frescoes  and 
panels.  Be  this  as  it  may,  the  fact  grows  daily  on  me 
that  men  have  not  at  all  times  seen  in  the  same  degree 
the  nature  which  has  always  equally  surrounded  them  ; 
and  that  during  some  periods  they  have,  for  explicable 
reasons,  seen  less  not  only  than  their  successors,  but 
also  than  their  predecessors  ;  and  seen  that  little  in  a 
manner  conventional  in  proportion  to  its  monotony. 
There  are  things  about  which  certain  historic  epochs 
are  strangely  silent ;  so  much  so,  indeed,  that  the 
breaking  of  the  silence  impresses  us  almost  as  the 
more  than  human  breaking  of  a  spell ;  and  that  silence 
is  the  result  of  a  grievous  wrong,  of  a  moral  disease 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  117 

which  half  closes  the  eyes  of  the  fancy,  or  of  a  moral 
poison  which  presents  to  those  sorely  aching  eyes 
only  a  glimmer  amid  darkness.  And  it  is  as  the  most 
singular  instance  of  such  conditions  that  I  should  wish 
to  study,  in  themselves,  their  causes  and  effects,  the 
great  differences  existing  between  the  ancients  and 
ourselves  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  men  of  the  genuine 
Middle  Ages  on  the  other,  in  the  degree  of  interest 
taken  respectively  by  each  in  external  nature,  the 
seasons  and  that  rural  life  which  seems  to  bring  us 
into  closest  contact  with  them  both. 

There  is,  of  course,  a  considerable  difference  between 
the  manner  in  which  the  country,  its  aspects  and  oc- 
cupations, are  treated  by  the  poets  of  Antiquity  and 
by  those  of  our  own  day  ;  in  the  mode  of  enjoying 
them  of  an  ancient  who  had  read  Theocritus  and 
Virgil  and  Tibullus,  and  a  modern  whose  mind  is  un- 
consciously full  of  the  influence  of  Wordsworth  or 
Shelley  or  Ruskin.  But  it  is  a  mere  difference  of  mode ; 
and  is  not  greater,  I  think,  than  the  difference  between 
the  descriptions  in  the  "Allegro,"  and  the  descriptions 
in  "Men  and  Women  ;"  than  the  difference  between 
the  love  of  our  Elizabethans  for  the  minuter  details  of 
the  country,  the  flowers  by  the  stream,  the  birds  in  the 
bushes,  the  ferrets,  frogs,  lizards,  and  similar  small 
creatures  ;  and  the  pleasure  of  our  own  contemporaries 
in  the  larger,  more  shifting,  and  perplexing  forms  and 
colours  of  cloud,  sunlight,  earth,  and  rock.  The  de- 
scription of  effects  such  as  these  latter  ones,  nay,  the 


ii8  EUPH  ORION. 

attention  and  appreciation  given  to  them,  are  things 
of  our  own  century,  even  as  is  the  power  and  desire  of 
painting  them.  Landscape,  in  the  sense  of  our  artists 
of  to-day,  is  a  very  recent  thing  ;  so  recent  that  even 
in  the  works  of  Turner,  who  was  perhaps  the  earHest 
landscape  painter  in  the  modern  sense,  we  are  forced 
to  separate  from  the  real  rendering  of  real  effects,  a 
great  deal  in  which  the  tints  of  sky  and  sea  are 
arranged  and  distributed  as  a  mere  vast  conventional 
piece  of  decoration.  Nor  could  it  be  otherwise.  For, 
in  poetry  as  in  painting,  landscape  could  become  a 
separate  and  substantive  art  only  when  the  interest  in 
the  mere  ins  and  outs  of  human  adventure,  in  the 
mere  structure  and  movement  of  human  limbs,  had 
considerably  diminished.  There  is  room,  in  epic  or 
drama,  only  for  such  little  scraps  of  description  as  will 
make  clearer,  without  checking,  the  human  action  ;  as 
there  is  place,  in  a  fresco  of  a  miracle,  or  a  little  picture 
of  carousing  and  singing  bacchantes  and  Venetian 
dandies,  only  for  such  little  bits  of  laurel  grove,  or  dim 
plain,  or  blue  alpine  crags,  as  can  be  introduced  in 
the  gaps  between  head  and  head,  or  figure  and  figure. 
Thus,  therefore,  a  great  difference  must  exist 
between  what  would  be  felt  and  written  about  the 
country  and  the  seasons  by  an  ancient,  by  a  man  of 
the  sixteenth  century,  or  by  a  contemporary  of  our 
own  :  a  difference,  however,  solely  of  mode  ;  for  we 
feel  sure  that  of  the  three  men  each  would  find  some- 
thiner   to   delight  himself  and  wherewith  to  delight 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  119 

others  among  the  elm-bounded  English  meadows,  the 
flat  cornfields  of  central  France,  the  vine  and  olive 
yards  of  Italy — wherever,  in  short,  he  might  find  him- 
self face  to  face  and,  so  to  speak,  hand  in  hand  with 
Nature.  But  about  the  man  of  the  Middle  Ages 
(unless,  perhaps,  in  Italy,  where  the  whole  Middle 
Ages  were  merely  an  earlier  Renaissance)  we  could 
have  no  such  assurance  ;  nay,  we  might  be  persuaded 
that,  however  great  his  genius,  be  he  even  a  Gottfried 
von  Strassburg,  or  a  Walther  von  der  Vogelweide,  or 
the  unknown  Frenchman  who  has  left  us  "  Aucassin 
et  Nicolette,"  he  would  bring  back  impressions  only 
of  two  things,  authorized  and  consecrated  by  the 
poetic  routine  of  his  contemporaries — of  spring  and 
of  the  woods. 

There  is  nothing  more  characteristic  of  mediaeval 
poetry  than  this  limitation.  Of  autumn,  of  winter  ; 
of  the  standing  corn,  the  ripening  fruit  of  summer  ;  of 
all  these  things  so  dear  to  the  ancients  and  to  all  men 
of  modern  times,  the  Middle  Ages  seem  to  know 
nothing.  The  autumn  harvests,  the  mists  and  won- 
drous autumnal  transfiguration  of  the  humblest  tree, 
or  bracken,  or  bush  ;  the  white  and  glittering  splendour 
of  winter,  and  its  cosy  life  by  hearth  or  stove  ;  the 
drowsiness  of  summer,  its  suddenly  inspired  wish  for 
shade  and  dew  and  water,  all  this  left  them  stolid. 
To  move  them  was  required  the  feeling  of  spring,  the 
strongest,  most  complete  and  stirring  impression  which, 
in  our  temperate  climates,  can   be  given  by  Nature  : 


I20  EUPHORION. 

the  whole  pleasurableness  of  warm  air,  clear  moist 
sky,  the  surprise  of  the  shimmer  of  pale  green,  of  the 
yellowing  blossom  on  tree  tops,  the  first  flicker  of 
faint  shadow  where  all  has  been  uniform,  colourless, 
shadeless  ;  the  replacing  of  the  long  silence  by  the 
endless  twitter  and  trill  of  birds,  endless  in  its  way  as 
is  the  sea,  twitter  and  trill  on  every  side,  depths  and 
depths  of  it,  of  every  degree  of  distance  and  faintness, 
a  sea  of  bird  song ;  and  along  with  this  the  sense  of 
infinite  renovation  to  all  the  earth  and  to  man's  own 
heart.  Of  all  Nature's  effects  this  one  alone  goes 
sparkling  to  the  head  ;  and  it  alone  finds  a  response 
in  mediaeval  poetry.  Spring,  spring,  endless  spring — 
for  three  long  centuries  throughout  the  world  a  dreary 
green  monotony  of  spring  all  over  France,  Provence, 
Italy,  Spain,  Germany,  England  ;  spring,  spring, 
nothing  but  spring  even  in  the  mysterious  countries 
governed  by  the  Grail  King,  by  the  Fairy  Morgana, 
by  Queen  Proserpine,  by  Prester  John  ;  nay,  in  the 
new  Jerusalem,  in  the  kingdom  of  Heaven  itself, 
nothing  but  spring  ;  till  one  longs  for  a  bare  twig,  for 
a  yellow  leaf,  for  a  frozen  gutter,  as  for  a  draught  of 
water  in  the  desert.  The  green  fields  and  meadows 
enamelled  with  painted  flowers,  how  one  detests 
them !  how  one  would  rejoice  to  see  them  well 
sprinkled  with  frost  or  burnt  up  to  brown  in  the  dry 
days  !  the  birds,  the  birds  which  warble  through  every 
sonnet,  canzone,  sirventes,  glosa,  dance  lay,  roundelay, 
vi relay,  rondel,  ballade,  and  whatsoever  else  it  may 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  121 

be  called, — how  one  wishes  them  silent  for  ever,  or 
their  twitter,  the  tarantarantandei  of  the  eternal 
German  nightingale  especially,  drowned  by  a  good 
howling  wind  !  After  any  persistent  study  of  medi- 
aeval poetry,  one's  feeling  towards  spring  is  just  similar 
to  that  of  the  morbid  creature  in  Schubert's  "  Miillerin," 
who  would  not  stir  from  home  for  the  dreadful, 
dreadful  greenness,  which  he  would  fain  bleach  with 
tears,  all  around  : 

Ich  mochte  ziehn  in  die  Welt  hinaus,  hinaus  in  die  weite  Welt, 
Wenn's  nur  so  griin,  so  griin  nicht  war  da  draussen  in  Wald  und 
Feld. 

Moreover  this  mediaeval  spring  is  the  spring  neither 
of  the  shepherd,  nor  of  the  farmer,  nor  of  any  man  to 
whom  spring  brings  work  and  anxiety  and  hope  of 
gain  ;  it  is  a  mere  vague  spring  of  gentle-folk,  or  at 
all  events  of  well-to-do  burgesses,  taking  their  pleasure 
on  the  lawns  of  castle  parks,  or  the  green  holiday 
places  close  to  the  city,  much  as  we  see  them  in  the 
first  part  of  "  Faust ;  "  a  sweet  but  monotonous  charm 
of  grass,  beneath  green  lime  tree,  or  in  the  South  the 
elm  or  plane ;  under  which  are  seated  the  poet  and  the 
fiddler,  playing  and  singing  for  the  young  women, 
their  hair  woven  with  chaplets  of  fresh  flowers, 
dancing  upon  the  sward.  And  poet  after  poet,  Pro- 
vencal, Italian,  and  German,  Nithart  and  Ulrich,  and 
even  the  austere  singer  of  the  Holy  Grail,  Wolfram, 
pouring  out  verse  after  verse  of  the  songs  in  praise 


122  EVPHORION. 

of  spring,  which  they  make  even  as  girls  wind  their 
garlands  :  songs  of  quaint  and  graceful  ever-changing 
rythm,  now  slowly  circling,  now  bounding  along,  now 
stamping  out  the  measure  like  the  feet  of  the  dancers, 
now  winding  and  turning  as  wind  and  twine  their 
arms  in  the  long-linked  mazes  ;  while  the  few  and 
ever-repeated  ideas,  the  old,  stale  platitudes  of  praise 
of  woman,  love  pains,  joys  of  dancing,  pleasure  of 
spring  (spring,  always  spring,  eternal,  everlasting 
spring)  seem  languidly  to  follow  the  life  and  move- 
ment of  the  mere  metre.  Poets,  these  German,  Pro- 
vencal, French,  and  early  Italian  lyrists,  essentially  (if 
we  venture  to  speak  heresy)  not  of  ideas  or  emotions, 
but  of  metre,  of  rythm  and  rhyme  ;  with  just  the 
minimum  of  necessary  thought,  perpetually  presented 
afresh  just  as  the  words,  often  and  often  repeated  and 
broken  up  and  new  combined,  of  a  piece  of  music — 
poetry  which  is  in  truth  a  sort  of  music,  dance  or 
dirge  or  hymn  music  as  the  case  may  be,  more  than 
anything  else. 

As  it  is  in  mediaeval  poetry  with  the  seasons,  so  it 
is  likewise  with  the  country  and  its  occupations  :  as 
there  is  only  spring,  so  there  is  only  the  forest.  Of 
the  forest,  mediaeval  poetry  has  indeed  much  to  say  ; 
more  perhaps,  and  more  familiar  with  its  pleasures, 
than  Antiquity.  There  is  the  memorable  forest  where 
the  heroes  of  the  Nibelungen  go  to  hunt,  followed 
by  their  w^aggons  of  provisions  and  wine  ;  where 
Siegfried    overpowers    the   bear,  and    returns    to    his 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  123 

laughing  comrades  with  the  huge  thing  chained  to  his 
saddle  ;  where,  in  that  clear  space  which  we  see  so 
distinctly,  a  lawn  on  to  which  the  blue  black  firs  are 
encroaching,  Siegfried  stoops  to  drink  of  the  spring 
beneath  the  lime  tree,  and  Hagen  drives  his  boar- 
spear  straight  through  the  Nibelung's  back.  There  is 
the  thick  wood,  all  a  golden  haze  through  the  young 
green,  and  with  an  atmosphere  of  birds'  song,  where 
King  ]\Iark  discovers  Tristram  and  Iseult  in  the  cave, 
the  deceitful  sword  between  them,  as  Gottfried  von 
Strassburg  relates  with  wonderful  luscious  charm. 
The  forest,  also,  more  bleak  and  austere,  where  the 
four  outlawed  sons  of  Aymon  live  upon  roots  and  wild 
animals,  where  they  build  their  castle  by  the  Meuse. 
Further,  and  most  lovely  of  all,  the  forest  in  which 
Nicolette  makes  herself  a  hut  of  branches,  bracken, 
and  flowers,  through  which  the  stars  peep  down  on 
her  whiteness  as  she  dreams  of  her  Lord  Aucassin. 
The  forest  where  Huon  meets  Oberon  ;  and  Guy  de 
Lusignan,  the  good  snake-lady  ;  and  Parzival  finds  on 
the  snow  the  feathers  and  the  drops  of  blood  which 
throw  him  into  his  long  day-dream  ;  and  Owen  dis- 
covers the  tomb  of  Merlin  ;  the  forest,  in  short,  which 
extends  its  interminable  glades  and  serried  masses  of 
trunks  and  arches  of  green  from  one  end  to  the  other 
of  mediaeval  poetry.  It  is  very  beautiful,  this  forest 
of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  but  it  is  monotonous,  melancholy ; 
and  has  a  terrible  eeriness  in  its  endlessness.  For 
there  is  nothingr  else.     There  are  no  meadows  where 


124  EUP  MORION. 

the  cows  lie  lazily,  no  fields  where  the  red  and  purple 
kerchiefs  of  the  reapers  overtop  the  high  corn  ;  no 
orchards,  no  hayfields  ;  nothing  like  those  hill  slopes 
where  the  wild  herbs  encroach  upon  the  vines,  and  the 
goats  of  Corydon  and  Damoetas  require  to  be  kept 
from  mischief;  where,  a  little  lower  down,  the  Athe- 
nian shopkeeper  of  Aristophanes  goes  daily  to  look 
whether  yesterday's  hard  figs  may  not  have  ripened,  or 
the  vine  wreaths  pruned  last  week  have  grown  too  lushly. 
Nor  anything  of  the  sort  of  those  Umbrian  meadows, 
where  Virgil  himself  will  stop  and  watch  the  white 
bullocks  splashing  slowly  into  the  shallow,  sedgy 
Clitumnus ;  still  less  like  those  hamlets  in  the  corn- 
fields through  which  Propertius  would  stroll,  follow- 
ing the  jolting  osier  waggon,  or  the  procession  with 
garlands  and  lights  to  Pales  or  to  the  ochre-stained 
garden  god.  Nothing  of  all  this  :  there  are  no  culti- 
vated spots  in  mediaeval  poetry ;  the  city  only,  and 
the  castle,  and  the  endless,  all-encompassing  forest. 

And  to  this  narrowness  of  mediaeval  notions  of  out- 
door life,  inherited  together  with  mediaeval  subjects 
by  the  poets  even  of  the  sixteenth  century,  must  be 
referred  the  curious  difference  existing  between  the  ro- 
mance poets  of  antiquity,  like  Homer  in  the  Odyssey, 
and  the  romance  poets  —  Boiardo,  Ariosto,  Tasso, 
Spenser,  Camoens — of  modern  times,  in  the  matter  of 
— how  shall  I  express  it  ?— the  ideal  life,  the  fortunate 
realms,  the  "  Kennaqwhere."  In  Homer,  in  all  the 
ancients,  the  ideal  country  is  merely  a  more  delightful 


THE  OUTDUUR  FOETKY.  125 

reality;  and  its  inhabitants  happier  everyday  men  and 
women  ;  in  the  poetry  sprung  from  the  Middle  Ages  it 
is  always  a  fairyland  constructed  by  mechanicians  and 
architects.  For,  as  we  have  seen,  the  Middle  Ages 
could  bequeath  to  the  sixteenth  century  no  ideal  of 
peaceful  outdoor  enjoyment.  Hence,  in  the  poetry 
of  the  sixteenth  century,  still  permeated  by  mediaeval 
traditions,  an  appalling  artificiality  of  delightfulness. 
Fallerina,  Alcina,  Armida,  Acrasia,  all  imitated  from 
the  original  Calypso,  are  not  strong  and  splendid 
god-women,  living  among  the  fields  and  orchards, 
but  dainty  ladies  hidden  in  elaborate  gardens,  all 
bedizened  with  fashionable  architecture :  regular 
palaces,  pleasaunces,  with  uncomfortable  edifices, 
artificial  waterfalls,  labyrinths,  rare  and  monstrous 
plants,  parrots,  apes,  giraffes  ;  childish  splendours  of 
gardening  and  engineering  and  menageries,  which  we 
meet  already  in  "  Ogier  the  Dane  "  and  "  Huon  of  Bor- 
deaux," and  which  later  poets  epitomized  out  of  the 
■endless  descriptions  of  Colonna's  "  Hypnerotomachia 
Poliphili,"  and  the  still  more  frightful  inventories  of 
the  Amadis  romances.  They  are,  each  of  them,  a  kind 
of  anticipated  Marly,  Versailles,  Prince  Elector's  Frie- 
•drichsruhe  or  Nymphenburg,  with  clipped  cypresses 
and  yews,  doubtless,  and  (O  Pales  and  Pan  !)  flower- 
beds filled  with  coloured  plaster  and  spas,  and  cas- 
cades spirting  out  (thanks  to  fifty  invisible  pumps) 
under  your  feet  and  over  your  head.  All  the 
vineyards  and  cornfields   have   been  swept   away  to 


126  EUPHORION. 

make  these  solemn  terraces  and  water-works  ;  all  the 
cottages  which,  with  their  little  wooden  shrine,  their 
humble  enclosure  of  sunflowers  and  rosemary  and  fruit 
trees,  their  buzzing  hives  and  barking  dogs,  were  loved 
and  sung  even  by  town  rakes  like  Catullus  and  smart 
coffeehouse  wits  like  Horace  ;  all  these  have  been  swept 
away  to  be  replaced  by  the  carefully  constructed 
(^wire?)  bowers,  the  aviaries,  the  porticoes,  the  frightful 
circular  edifice  itondo  ^  il  ricco  edificio),  a  masterpiece 
of  Pailadian  stucco  work,  in  which  Armida  and  Rinaldo, 
Acrasia  and  her  Knight,  drearily  disport  themselves. 
What  has  become  of  Calypso's  island  ?  of  the  orchards 
of  Alcinous  ?  What  would  the  noble  knights  and  ladies 
of  Ariosto  and  Spenser  think  of  them  ?  What  would 
they  say,  these  romantic,  dainty  creatures,  were  they 
to  meet  Nausicaa  with  the  washed  linen  piled  on  her 
waggon  ?  Alas  !  they  would  take  her  for  a  laundress. 
For  it  is  the  terrible  aristocratic  idleness  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  their  dreary  delicacy,  which  hampers  Boiardo^ 
Ariosto,  Tasso,  Spenser,  even  in  the  midst  of  their 
most  unblushing  plagiarisms  from  Antiquity :  their 
heroes  and  heroines  have  been  brought  up,  surrounded 
by  equerries  and  duennas,  elegant,  useless  things,  or 
at  best  (the  knights  at  least)  good  only  for  aristocratic 
warfare.  Plough  or  prune  !  defile  the  knightly  hands  I 
wash  or  cook,  ply  the  loom  like  Nausicaa,  Calypso,  or 
Penelope  !  The  mere  thought  sends  them  very  nearly 
into  a  faint.  No  :  the  ladies  of  mediaeval  romance 
must  sit  quiet,  idle ;    at  most  they  may  sing  to  the 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  127 

lute  ;  and  if  they  work  with  their  hands,  it  must  be 
some  dreary,  strictly  useless,  piece  of  fancy  work  ;  they 
are  hot-house  plants,  all  these  dainty  folk. 

Had  they  no  eyes,  then,  these  poets  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  that  they  could  see,  among  all  the  things  of 
Nature,  only  those  few  which  had  been  seen  by  their 
predecessors  ?  At  first  one  feels  tempted  to  think  so, 
till  the  recollection  of  many  vivid  touches  in  spring 
and  forest  descriptions  persuades  one  that,  enormous 
as  was  the  sway  of  tradition  among  these  men,  they 
were  not  all  of  them,  nor  always,  repeating  mere  con- 
ventional platitudes.  This  singular  limitation  in  the 
mediaeval  perceptions  of  Nature — a  limitation  so  im- 
portant as  almost  to  make  it  appear  as  if  the  Middle 
Ages  had  not  perceived  Nature  at  all — is  most  fre- 
quently attributed  to  the  prevalence  of  asceticism, 
which,  according  to  some  critics,  made  all  mediaeval 
men  into  so  many  repetitions  of  Bernard  of  Clairvaux, 
of  whom  it  is  written  that,  being  asked  his  opinion  of 
Lake  Leman,  he  answered  with  surprise  that,  during 
his  journey  from  Geneva  to  the  Rhone  Valley,  he  had 
remarked  no  lake  whatever,  so  absorbed  had  he  been 
in  spiritual  meditations.  But  the  predominance  of 
asceticism  has  been  grossly  exaggerated.  It  was  a 
state  of  moral  tension  which  could  not  exist  uninter- 
ruptedly, and  could  exist  only  in  the  classes  for  whom 
poetry  was  not  written.  The  mischief  done  by  asceti- 
cism was  the  warping  of  the  moral  nature  of  men,  not 
of  their  aesthetic  feelings;  it  had  no  influence  upon 


5  28  EUPH  ORION. 

the  vast  numbers,  the  men  and  women  who  relished 
the  profane  and  obscene  fleshliness  and  buffoonery  of 
stage  plays  and  fabliaux,  and  those  who  favoured  the 
delicate  and  exquisite  immoralities  of  Courtly  poetry. 
Indeed,  the  presence  of  whole  classes  of  writings,  of 
which  such  things  as  Boccaccio's  Tales,  the  "  Wife  of 
Bath,"  and  Villon's  "  Ballades,"  on  the  one  hand,  and 
the  songs  of  the  troubadours,  the  poem  of  Gottfried, 
and  the  romance  or  rather  novel  of  "  Flamenca,"  are 
respectively  but  the  most  conspicuous  examples,  ought 
to  prove  only  too  clearly  that  the  Middle  Ages,  for  all 
their  asceticism,  were  both  as  gross  and  as  aesthetic  in 
sensualism  as  antiquity  had  been  before  them.  We 
must,  therefore,  seek  elsewhere  than  in  asceticism, 
necessarily  limited,  and  excluding  the  poetry-reading 
public,  for  an  explanation  of  this  peculiarity  of  mediaeval 
poetry.  And  we  shall  find  it,  I  think,  in  that  which 
during  the  Middle  Ages  could,  because  it  was  an  all- 
regulating  social  condition,  really  create  universal 
habits  of  thought  and  feeling,  namely,  feudalism.  A 
moral  condition  like  asceticism  must  leave  unbiassed 
all  such  minds  as  are  incapable  of  feeling  it ;  but  a 
social  institution  like  feudalism  walls  in  the  life  of 
every  individual,  and  forces  his  intellectual  movements 
into  given  paths  ;  nor  is  there  any  escape,  excepting 
in  places  where,  as  in  Italy  and  in  the  free  towns  of 
the  North,  the  feudal  conditions  are  wholly  or  partially 
unknown.  To  feudalism,  therefore,  would  I  ascribe 
this,  which    appears    at  first   so    purely  aesthetic,  as 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  129 

opposed  to  social,  a  characteristic  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
Ever  since  Schiller,  in  his  "  Gods  of  Greece,"  spoke  for 
the  first  time  of  undivinized  Nature  {die  entgotterte 
Natuj'),  it  has  been  the  fashion  among  certain  critics 
to  fall  foul  of  Christianity  for  having  robbed  the  fields 
and  woods  of  their  gods,  and  reduced  to  mere  manured 
clods  the  things  which  had  been  held  sacred  by  an- 
tiquity. Desecrated  in  those  long  mediaeval  centuries 
Nature  may  truly  have  been,  but  not  by  the  holy 
water  of  Christian  priests.  Desecrated  because  out  of 
the  fields  and  meadows  was  driven  a  divinity  greater 
than  Pales  or  Vertumnus  or  mighty  Pan,  the  divinity 
called  Mail.  For  in  the  terrible  times  when  civilization 
was  at  its  lowest,  the  things  of  the  world  had  been 
newly  allotted  ;  and  by  this  new  allotment,  man — the 
man  who  thinks  and  loves  and  hopes  and  strives,  man 
who  fights  and  sings — was  shut  out  from  the  fields 
and  meadows,  forbidden  the  labour,  nay,  almost  the 
sight,  of  the  earth  ;  and  to  the  tending  of  kine,  and 
sowing  of  crops,  to  all  those  occupations  which  an- 
tiquity had  associated  with  piety  and  righteousness, 
had  deemed  worthy  of  the  gods  themselves,  was 
assigned,  or  rather  condemned,  a  creature  whom 
every  advancing  year  untaught  to  think  or  love,  or 
hope,  or  fight,  or  strive  ;  but  taught  most  utterly  to 
suffer  and  to  despair.  For  a  man  it  is  difficult  to  call 
him,  this  mediaeval  serf,  this  lump  of  earth  detached 
from  the  field  and  wrought  into  a  semblance  of  man- 
hood, merely  that  the  soil  of  which  it  is  part  should 

10 


T30  E  UP  MORION. 

be  delved  and  sown,  and  then  manured  with  its  carcass 
or  its  blood  ;  nor  as  a  man  did  the  Middle  Ages  con- 
ceive it.  The  serf  was  not  even  allowed  human  pro- 
genitors :  his  foul  breed  had  originated  in  a  lewd 
miracle  ;  his  stupidity  and  ferocity  were  as  those  of 
the  beasts  ;  his  cunning  was  demoniac  ;  he  was  born 
under  God's  curse  ;  no  words  could  paint  his  wicked- 
ness, no  persecutions  could  exceed  his  deserts  ;  the 
whole  world  turned  pale  at  his  crime,  for  he  it  was,  he 
and  not  any  human  creature,  who  had  nailed  Christ 
upon  the  cross.  Like  the  hunger  and  sores  of  a  fox 
or  a  wolf,  his  hunger  and  his  sores  are  forgotten,  never 
noticed.  Were  it  not  that  legal  and  ecclesiastical 
narratives  of  trials  (not  of  feudal  lords  for  crushing 
and  contaminating  their  peasants,  but  of  peasants  for 
spitting  out  and  trampling  on  the  consecrated  wafer) 
give  us  a  large  amount  of  pedantically  stated  detail  ; 
tell  us  how  misery  begat  vice,  and  filth  and  starvation 
united  families  in  complicated  meshes  of  incest,  taught 
them  depopulation  as  a  virtue  and  a  necessity  ;  and 
how  the  despair  of  any  joy  in  nature,  of  any  mercy 
from  God,  hounded  men  and  women  into  the  unspeak- 
able orgies,  the  obscene  parodies,  of  devil  worship  ; 
were  it  not  for  these  horrible  shreds  of  judicial  evidence 
(as  of  tatters  of  clothes  or  blood-clotted  hairs  on  the 
shoes  of  a  murderer)  we  should  know  little  or  nothing 
of  the  life  of  the  men  and  women  who,  in  mediaeval 
France  and  Germany,  did  the  work  which  had  been 
taught    by    Hesiod    and    Virgil.       About    all    these 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  131 

tragedies  the  literature  of  the  Middle  Ages,  read}-  to 
show  us  town  vice  and  town  horror,  dens  of  prostitu- 
tion and  creaking,  overweighted  gibbets,  as  in  Villon's 
poems,  utters  not  a  word.  All  that  we  can  hear  is 
the  many-throated  yell  of  mediseval  poets,  noble  and 
plebeian,  French,  Provencal,  and  German,  against  the 
brutishness,  the  cunning,  the  cruelty,  the  hideousness, 
the  heresy  of  the  serf,  whose  name  becomes  synony- 
mous with  every  baseness  ;  which,  in  mock  grammatical 
style,  is  declined  into  every  epithet  of  wickedness  ; 
whose  punishment  is  prayed  for  from  the  God  whom 
he  outrages  by  his  very  existence  ;  a  hideous  clamour 
of  indecent  jibe,  of  brutal  vituperation,  of  senseless 
accusation,  of  every  form  of  words  which  furious  hatred 
can  assume,  the  echoes  of  which  reached  even  countries 
like  Tuscany,  where  serfdom  was  well-nigh  unknown, 
and  have  reached  even  to  us  in  the  scraps  of  epigram  still 
Tbandied  about  by  the  townsfolk  against  the  peasants, 
nay,  by  the  peasants  against  themselves. ^  A  monstrous 

'  The  reader  may  oppose  to  my  views  the  existence  of  the 
class  of  poems,  French,  Latin,  and  German,  of  which  the  Pro- 
vencal Pastoia-cla  is  the  original  type,  and  which  represent  the 
courting,  by  the  poet,  who  is,  of  course,  a  knight,  of  a  beautiful 
country-girl,  who  is  shown  us  as  feeding  her  sheep  or  spinning 
with  her  distaff.  But  these  poems  are,  to  the  best  of  my  know- 
ledge, all  of  a  single  pattern,  and  extremely  insincere  and  arti- 
ficial in  tone,  that  I  feel  inclined  to  class  them  with  the  pastorals 
— Dresden  china  idylls  by  men  who  had  never  looked  a  live 
peasant  in  the  face — of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries, 
as  distant  descendants  from  the  pastoral  poetry  of  antiquity,  of 
which  the  chivalric  poets  may  have  got  some  indirect  notions 
as  they  did  of  the  antic^ue  epics.     It    is  moreover   extremely 


132 


EUPHORION. 


rag  doll,  dressed  up  in  shreds  of  many-coloured  villainy, 
without  a  recognizable  human  feature,  dragged  in  the 

likely  that  these  love  poems,  in  which,  successfully  or  unsuccess- 
fully, the  poet  usually  offers  a  bribe  to  the  woman  of  low  degree, 
conceal  beneath  the  conventional  pastoral  trappings  the  intrigues 
of  minnesingers  and  troubadours  with  women  of  the  small 
artizan  or  village  proprietor  class.  The  real  peasant  woman — 
the  female  of  the  villain — could  scarcely  have  been  above  the 
notice  of  the  noblemen's  servants  ;  and,  in  countries  where  the 
seigneurial  rights  were  in  vigour,  would  scarcely  have  been 
offered  presents  and  fine  words.  As  regards  the  innumerable 
poems  against  the  peasantry,  I  may  refer  the  reader  to  an 
extremely  curious  publication  of  "  Carmina  Medii  ^vi,"  recently 
made  by  Sig.  Francesco  Novati,  and  which  contains,  besides  a 
selection  of  specimens,  a  list  of  references  on  the  subject  of 
poems  "  De  Natura  Rusticorum."  One  of  the  satirical  de- 
clensions runs  as  follows  : 


Singiclariter. 

Pbiraliter. 

Norn. 

Hie  villanus. 

Nom. 

Hi  maledicti. 

Gen. 

Huius  rustici. 

Gen. 

Horum  tristium. 

Dat. 

Huic  tferfero  {sic). 

Dat. 

His  mendacibus. 

Ace. 

Hunc  furem. 

Ace. 

Hos  nequissimos. 

Voc. 

0  latro. 

Voc. 

0  pessimi. 

Abl. 

Ab  hoc  depredatore. 

Abl. 

Ab  his  infidelibus 

The  accusation  of  heresy  and  of  crucifying  Christ  is  evidently 
due  to  the  devil-worship  prevalent  among  the  serfs,  and  is  thus 
alluded  to  in  a  north  Italian  poem,  probably  borrowed  from  the 
French  : 

Christo  fa  da  villan  crucifico, 

E  stagom  sempre  in  pioza,  in  vento,  e  in  neve, 

Perche  havom  fato  cosi  gran  pecca. 

This  feeling  is  exitctly  analogous  to  that  existing  nowadays  in 
semi-barbarous  countries  against  the  Jews.  The  idle  hated  the 
industrious,  and  hated  them  all  the  more  when  their  industry 
brought  them  any  profit. 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  133 

mud,  pilloried  with  unspeakable  ordure,  paraded  in 
mock  triumph  like  a  King  of  Fools,  and  burnt  in  the 
market-place  like  Antichrist,  such  is  the  image  which 
mediaeval  poetry  has  left  us  of  the  creature  who  was 
once  the  pious  rustic,  the  innocent  god-beloved 
husbandman,  on  whose  threshold  justice  stopped  a 
while  when  she  fled  from  the  towns  of  Antiquity. 

Yet  not  so  ;  I  can  recall  one,  though  only  one, 
occasion  in  which  mediaeval  literature  shows  us  the 
serf.  The  place  is  surely  the  most  unexpected,  the 
charming  thirteenth  century  tale  of  "  Aucassin  et 
Nicolette."  In  his  beautiful  essay  upon  that  story,  Mr. 
Pater  has  deliberately  omitted  this  episode,  which  is 
indeed  like  a  spot  of  blood-stained  mud  upon  some 
perfect  tissue  of  silver  flowers  on  silver  ground.  It  is 
a  piece  of  cruellest  realism,  because  quite  quiet  and 
unforced,  in  the  midst  of  a  kind  of  fairy-land  idyl  of 
almost  childish  love,  the  love  of  the  beautiful  son  of 
the  lord  of  Beaucaire  for  a  beautiful  Saracen  slave 
girl.  For,  although  Aucassin  and  Nicolette  are  often 
separated,  and  always  disconsolate — she  in  her  wonder- 
fully frescoed  vaulted  room,  he  in  his  town  prison — 
there  is  always  surrounding  them  a  sort  of  fairy  land 
of  trees  and  flowers,  a  constant  song  of  birds  ; 
although  they  wander  through  the  woods  and  tear 
their  delicate  skin,  and  catch  their  hair  in  brambles 
and  briars,  we  have  always  the  sense  of  the  daisies 
bending  beneath  their  tread,  of  the  green  leaves 
rustling;    aside    from    their    heads    covered    with  hair 


134  EUPHORION. 

"  blond  et  menu  crespele."  Their  very  hardships  are- 
lovely,  like  the  hut  of  flowering  branches  and  grasses 
which  Nicolette  builds  for  herself,  and  through  whose 
fissures  the  moonlight  shines  and  the  little  stars 
twinkle  :  so  much  so,  that  when  they  weep,  these  two 
beautiful  and  dainty  creatures,  we  listen  as  if  to  sing- 
ing, and  with  no  more  sense  of  grief  than  at  some 
pathetic  little  snatch  of  melody.  And  in  the  midst 
of  this  idyl  of  lovely  things  ;  in  the  midst  of  all  these 
delicate  patternings,  whose  minuteness  and  faint  tint 
merge  into  one  vague  pleasurable  impression  ;  stands 
out,  unintentionally  placed  there  by  the  author,  little 
aware  of  its  terrible  tragic  realism,  the  episode  which 
I  am  going  to  translate. 

"  Thus  Aucassin  wandered  all  day  through  the 
forest,  without  hearing  any  news  of  his  sweet  love  ; 
and  when  he  saw  that  dusk  was  spreading,  he  began 
bitterly  to  weep.  As  he  was  riding  along  an  old  road, 
where  weeds  and  grass  grew  thick  and  high,  he 
suddenly  saw  before  him,  in  the  middle  of  this  road,  a 
man  such  as  I  am  going  to  describe  to  you.  He  was 
tall,  ugly  ;  nay,  hideous  quite  marvellously.  His  face 
was  blacker  than  smoked  meat,  and  so  wide,  that 
there  was  a  good  palm's  distance  between  his  eyes  ; 
his  cheeks  were  huge,  his  nostrils  also,  with  a  very  big 
flat  nose  ;  thick  lips  as  red  as  embers,  and  long  teeth 
yellow  and  smoke  colour.  He  wore  leathern  shoes 
and  gaiters,  kept  up  with  string  at  the  knees  ;  on  hig 
back   was   a   parti-coloured   coat.       He   was  leaning 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  135 

upon  a  stout  bludgeon.  Aucassin  was  startled  and 
fearful,  and  said  : 

"  '  Fair  brother  (  "  beau  frere  " — a  greeting  corre- 
sponding to  the  modern  "  bon  homme  ") !  God  be  with 
thee ! ' 

" '  God  bless  you  !  '   answered  the  man. 

" '  What  dost  thou  here  .-' '  asked  Aucassin. 

" '  What  is  that  to  you  } '  answered  the  man. 

" '  I  ask  thee  from  no  evil  motiv^e.' 

" '  Then  tell  me  why,'  said  the  man,  '  you  yourself 
are  weeping  with  such  grief.'  Truly,  were  I  a  rich 
man  like  you,  nothing  in  the  world  should  make  me 
weep.' 

"  '  And  how  dost  thou  know  me  ?  ' 

"  '  I  know  you  to  be  Aucassin,  the  son  of  the  Count  ; 
and  if  you  will  tell  me  why  you  weep,  I  will  tell  you 
wh}'  I  am  here.' 

" '  I  will  tell  thee  willingly,'  answered  Aucassin. 
'  This  morning  I  came  to  hunt  in  the  forest  ;  I  had 
a  white  greyhound,  the  fairest  in  the  world  ;  I  have 
lost  him — that  is  why  I  am  weeping.' 

"  '  What ! '  cried  the  man  ;  '  it  is  for  a  stinking  hound 
that  you  waste  the  tears  of  your  body  ?  Woe  to  those 
who  shall  pity  you  ;  you,  the  richest  man  of  this 
country.  If  your  father  wanted  fifteen  or  twenty 
white  greyhounds,  he  could  get  them.  I  am  weeping 
and  mourning  for  more  serious  matters.' 

"  '  And  what  are  these  t ' 

" '  I  will  tell  you.     I  was  hired  to  a  rich  farmer  to 


(36  EUPHORION. 

drive  his  plough,  dragged  by  four  bullocks.  Three 
days  ago,  I  lost  a  red  bullock,  the  best  of  the  four.  I 
left  the  plough,  and  sought  the  red  bullock  on  all 
sides,  but  could  not  find  him.  For  three  days  I  have 
neither  eaten  nor  drunk,  and  have  been  wandering 
thus.  I  have  been  afraid  of  going  to  the  town, 
where  they  would  put  me  in  jail,  because  I  have  not 
wherewith  to  pay  for  the  bullock.  All  I  possess  are 
the  clothes  on  my  back.  I  have  a  mother  ;  and  the 
poor  woman  had  nothing  more  valuable  than  me  ; 
since  she  had  only  an  old  smock  wherewith  to  cover 
her  poor  old  limbs.  They  have  torn  the  smock  off 
her  back,  and  now  she  has  to  lie  on  the  straw.  It  is 
about  her  that  I  am  afflicted  more  than  about  myself, 
because,  as  to  me,  I  may  get  some  money  some  day 
or  other,  and  as  to  the  red  bullock,  he  may  be  paid 
for  when  he  may.  And  I  should  never  weep  for  such 
a  trifle  as  that.  Ah !  woe  betide  those  who  shall 
make  sorrow  with  you  ! '  " 

Inserted  merely  to  give  occasion  to  show  Aucassin's 
good  heart  in  paying  the  twenty  j-cZs-  for  the  man's  red 
bullock  ;  perhaps  for  no  reason  at  all,  but  certainly 
with  no  idea  of  making  the  lover's  misery  seem 
by  comparison  trifling — there  are,  nevertheless,  few 
things  in  literature  more  striking  than  the  meeting  in 
the  wood  of  the  daintily  nurtured  boy,  weeping  over 
the  girl  whom  he  loves  with  almost  childish  love  of 
the  fancy  ;  and  of  that  ragged,  tattered,  hideous  serf, 
at  whose  very  aspect  the  Bel  Aucassin  stops  in  awe 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  137 

and  terror.  And  the  attitude  is  grand  of  this  unfor- 
tunate creature,  who  neither  begs  nor  threatens, 
scarcely  complains,  and  not  at  all  for  himself;  but 
merely  tells  his  sordid  misfortune  with  calm  resigna- 
tion, as  if  used  to  such  everyday  miseries,  roused  to 
indignation  only  at  the  sight  of  the  tears  which  the 
fine-bred  youth  is  shedding.  We  feel  the  dreadful 
solemnity  of  the  man's  words  ;  of  the  reproach  thus 
thrown  by  the  long-suffering  serf,  accustomed  to  mis- 
fortunes as  the  lean  ox  is  to  blows,  to  that  delicate 
thing  weeping  for  his  lady  love,  for  the  lady  of  his 
fancy.  It  is  the  one  occasion  upon  which  that  deli- 
cate and  fantastic  mediaeval  love  poetry,  that  fanciful, 
wistful  stripling  King  Love  of  the  Middle  Ages,  in 
which  he  keeps  high  court,  and  through  which  he  rides 
in  triumphal  procession,  laughing  and  fainting  by 
turns  with  all  his  dapper  artificiality  of  woes — is 
confronted  with  the  sordid  reality,  the  tragic  imper- 
sonation of  all  the  dumb  miseries,  the  lives  and 
loves,  crushed  and  defiled  unnoticed,  of  the  peasantry 
-of  those  days.  Yes,  while  they  sing — Provencals, 
minnesingers,  Sicilians,  sing  of  their  earthly  lady 
and  of  their  paramour  in  heaven — the  hideous  pea- 
sant, whose  naked  granny  is  starving  on  the  straw, 
looks  on  with  dull  and  tearless  eyes ;  crying  out 
to  posterity,  as  the  serf  cries  to  Aucassin  :  "  Woe  to 
ihose  who  shall  sorrow  at  the  tears  of  such  as  these." 


13S  EUPHORION. 

11. 

But  meanwhile,  during  those  centuries  which  He 
between  the  dark  ages  and  modern  times,  the  Middle 
Ages  (inasmuch  as  they  mean  not  a  mere  chronolo- 
gical period,  but  a  definite  social  and  mental  condition) 
fortunately  did  not  exist  everywhere.  Had  they  ex- 
isted, it  is  almost  impossible  to  understand  how  they 
would  ever  throughout  Europe  have  come  to  an  end  ;. 
for  as  the  favourite  proverb  of  Catharine  of  Siena  has 
it,  one  dead  man  cannot  bury  another  dead  man  ;  and 
the  Middle  Ages,  after  this  tedious  dying  of  the  fif- 
teenth century,  required  to  be  shovelled  into  the  tomb, 
nay,  rather,  given  the  final  stroke,  by  the  Renaissance. 
This  that  we  foolishly  call — giving  a  quite  incorrect 
notion  ofsudden  and  miraculous  birth — the  Renaissance, 
and  limit  to  the  time  of  the  revival  of  Greek  humani- 
ties, really  existed,  as  I  have  repeatedly  suggested, 
wherever,  during  the  mediaeval  centuries,  the  civiliza- 
tion of  which  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries 
were  big  was  not,  by  the  pressure  of  feudalism  and 
monasticism,  made  to  be  abortive  or  stillborn.  Low 
as  was  Italy  at  the  very  close  of  the  dark  ages,  and 
much  as  she  borrowed  for  a  long  while  from  the  more 
precocious  northern  nations,  especially  France  and 
Provence ;  Italy  had,  nevertheless,  an  enormous  ad- 
vantage in  the  fact  that  her  populations  were  not 
divided  into  victor  and  vanquished,  and  that  the  old 
Latin  institutions  of  town  and  country   were    never 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  139 

replaced,  except  in  certain  northern  and  southernmost 
districts,  by  feudal  arrangements.  The  very  first 
thing  which  strikes  us  in  the  obscure  Italian  common- 
wealths of  early  times,  is  that  in  these  resuscitated 
relics  of  Roman  or  Etruscan  towns  there  is  no  feeling 
of  feudal  superiority  and  inferiority  ;  that  there  is  no 
lord,  and  consequently  no  serf  Nor  is  this  the  case 
merely  within  the  city  walls.  The  never  sufficiently 
appreciated  difterence  between  the  Italian  free  burghs 
and  those  of  Germany,  Flanders,  and  Provence,  is 
that  the  citizens  depend  only  in  the  remotest  and  most 
purely  fictitious  way  upon  any  kind  of  suzerain  ;  and 
moreover  that  the  country,  instead  of  belonging  to 
feudal  nobles,  belong  every  day  more  and  more  com- 
pletely to  the  burghers.  The  peasant  is  not  a  serf,  but 
one  of  three  things — a  hired  labourer,  a  possessor  of 
property,  or  a  farmer,  liable  to  no  taxes,  paying  no 
rent,  and  only  sharing  with  the  proprietor  the  produce 
of  the  land.  By  this  latter  system,  existing,  then  as 
now,  throughout  Tuscany,  the  peasantry  was  an  inde- 
pendent and  well-to-do  class.  The  land  owned  by 
one  man  (who,  in  the  commonwealths,  was  usually  a 
shopkeeper  or  manufacturer  in  the  town)  was  divided 
into  farms  small  enough  to  be  cultivated — vines, 
olives,  corn,  and  fruit — by  one  family  of  peasants, 
helped  perhaps  by  a  paid  labourer.  The  thriftier  and 
less  scrupulous  peasants  could,  in  good  seasons,  put 
by  sufficient  profit  from  their  share  of  the  produce  to 
suffice  after  some  years,  and  with  the  addition  of  what 


I40  EUPHORION. 

the  women  might  make  by  washing,  spinning,  weav- 
ing, plaiting  straw  hats  (an  accomplishment  greatly 
insisted  upon  by  Lorenzo  dei  Medici),  and  so  forth, 
to  purchase  some  small  strip  of  land  of  their  own. 
Hence,  a  class  of  farmers  at  once  living  on  another 
man's  land  and  sharing  its  produce  with  him,  and 
cultivating  and  paying  taxes  upon  land  belonging  to 
themselves. 

Of  these  Tuscan  peasants  we  get  occasional  glimpses 
in  the  mediaeval  Italian  novelists — a  well-to-do  set  of 
people,  in  constant  communication  with  the  town 
where  they  sell  their  corn,  oil,  vegetables,  and  wine, 
and  easily  getting  confused  with  the  lower  class  of 
artizans  with  whom  theydoubtlesslargely  intermarried. 
These  peasants  whom  we  see  in  tidy  kilted  tunics  and 
leathern  gaiters,  driving  their  barrel-laden  bullock 
carts,  or  riding  their  mules  up  to  the  red  city  gates  in 
many  a  Florentine  and  Sienese  painting  of  the  four- 
teenth and  fifteenth  centuries,  were  in  many  respects 
better  off  than  the  small  artizans  of  the  city,  heaped 
up  in  squalid  houses,  and  oppressed  by  the  greater 
and  smaller  guilds.  Agnolo  Pandolfini,  teaching 
thrift  to  his  sons  in  Alberti's  charming  treatise  on 
"  The  Government  of  the  Family,"  frequently  groans 
over  the  insolence,  the  astuteness  of  the  peasantry  ; 
and  indeed  seems  to  consider  that  it  is  impossible 
to  cope  with  them — a  conclusion  which  would  have 
greatly  astounded  the  bailiffs  of  the  feudal  proprietors 
in  the  Two  Sicilies  and  beyond  the  Alps.     Indeed  it 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  141 

is  impossible  to  conceive  a  stranger  contrast  than  that 
between  the  northern  peasant,  the  star\-ed  and  stunted 
serf,  whom  Holbein  drew,  driving  his  lean  horses 
across  the  hard  furrow,  with  compassionate  Death 
helping  along  the  plough ;  and  the  Tuscan  farmer, 
as  shown  us  by  Lorenzo  dei  Medici — the  young  fellow 
who,  while  not  above  minding  his  cows  or  hoeing  up 
his  field,  goes  into  Florence  once  a  week,  offers  his 
sweetheart  presents  of  coral  necklaces,  silk  staylaces, 
and  paint  for  her  cheeks  and  eyelashes  ;  who  promises, 
to  please  her,  to  have  his  hair  frizzled  (as  only  the 
youths  of  the  Renaissance  knew  how  to  be  frizzled 
and  fuzzed)  by  the  barber,  and  even  dimly  hints  that 
some  day  he  may  appear  in  silken  jerkin  and  tight 
hose,  like  a  well-to-do  burgess.  No  greater  contrast 
perhaps,  unless  indeed  we  should  compare  his  sweet- 
heart, Lorenzo's  beautiful  Nenciozza,  with  her  box 
full  of  jewels,  her  Sunday  garb  of  damask  kirtle  arid 
gold-worked  bodice,  her  almost  queenly  ways  towards 
her  adorers,  with  the  wretched  creature,  not  a  woman, 
but  a  mere  female  animal,  cowering  among  her  starv- 
ing children  in  her  mud  cottage,  and  looking  forward, 
in  dull  lethargy,  after  the  morning  full  of  outrages  at 
the  castle,  to  the  night,  the  night  on  the  heath,  lit  with 
mysterious  flickers,  to  the  horrible  joys  of  the  sacri- 
fice which  the  oppressed  brings  to  the  dethroned,  the 
serf  to  Satan  ;  when,  in  short,  we  compare  the  peasant 
woman  described  by  Lorenzo  with  the  female  serf 
resuscitated   by  the  genius  of  IVIichelet ;  nay,    more 


f42  EUPHORION. 

poignant  still,  with  that  mother  in  the  "Dance  of  Death," 
seated  on  the  mud  flood  of  the  broken-roofed,  dis- 
mantled hovel,  stewing  something  on  a  fire  of  twigs, 
and  stretching  out  vain  arms  to  her  poor  tattered  baby 
■  boy,  whom,  with  the  good-humoured  tripping  step  of 
an  old  nurse,  the  kindly  skeleton  is  leading  away  out 
of  this  cruel  world. 

Such  were  the  conditions  of  the  peasantry  of  the 
great  Italian  commonwealths.  They  were,  as  much 
as  the  northern  serfs  were  the  reverse,  creatures 
pleasant  to  deal  with,  pleasant  to  watch. 

The  upper  classes,  on  the  other  hand,  differed  quite 
as  much  from  the  upper  classes  of  feudal  countries. 
They  were,  be  it  remembered,  men  of  business,  con- 
stantly in  contact  with  the  working  classes  ;  Albizis, 
Strozzis,  Pandolfinis,  Guinigis,  Tolomeis,  no  matter 
what  their  name,  these  men  who  built  palaces  and 
churches  which  outdid  the  magnificence  of  northern 
princes,  and  who  might,  at  any  moment,  be  sent 
ambassadors  from  Florence,  Lucca,  or  Siena,  to  the 
French  or  English  kings,  to  the  Emperor  or  the  Pope, 
spent  a  large  portion  of  their  days  at  their  office  desk, 
among  the  bales  of  their  warehouses,  behind  the 
counter  of  their  shops  ;  they  wore  the  same  dress,  had 
the  same  habits,  spoke  the  same  dialect,  as  the  weavers 
and  dyers,  the  carriers  and  porters  whom  they  em- 
ployed, and  whose  sons  might,  by  talent  and  industry, 
amass  a  fortune,  build  palaces,  and  go  ambassadors  to 
kings  in  their  turn.     When,  therefore,  thess  merchant 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  143 

■nobles  turned  to  the  country  for  rest  and  relief  fron:i 
their  cares,  it  was  not  to  the  country  as  it  existed  for 
the  feudal  noble  of  the  North.  Boar  and  stag  hunts 
had  no  attraction  for  quiet  men  of  business  ;  forests 
stocked  with  wild  beasts  where  vineyard  and  cornfield 
might  have  extended,  would  have  seemed  to  them  the 
very  height  of  wastefulness,  discomfort,  and  ugliness. 
Pacific  and  businesslike,  they  merely  transferred  to 
the  country  the  habits  of  thought  and  of  life  which 
had  arisen  in  the  city.  Not  for  them  any  imitation 
of  the  feudal  castle,  turreted  and  moated,  cut  up  into 
dark  irregular  rooms  and  yards,  filled  with  noisy  re- 
tainers and  stinking  hounds.  On  some  gentle  hillside 
a  well-planned  palace,  its  rooms  spacious  and  lofty, 
and  sparely  windowed  for  coolness  in  summer  ;  with 
a  neat  cloistered  court  in  the  centre,  ventilating  the 
whole  house,  and  affording  a  cool  place,  full  of  scent 
•of  flowers  and  sound  of  fountains  for  the  burning 
afternoons  ;  a  belvedere  tower  also,  on  which  to  seek 
a  breeze  on  stifling  nights,  when  the  very  stars  seem 
faint  for  heat,  and  the  dim  plumy  heads  of  cypress 
and  poplar  are  motionless  against  the  misty  blue  sky. 
In  front  a  broad  terrace,  whence  to  look  down  towards 
the  beloved  city,  a  vague  fog  of  roofs  in  the  distance  ; 
•on  the  side  and  behind,  elaborate  garden  walks  walled 
with  high  walls  of  box  and  oak  and  laurel,  in  which 
stand  statues  in  green  niches  ;  gardens  with  little 
channels  to  bring  water,  even  during  droughts,  to  the 
myrtles,  the  roses,  the  stocks  and  clove  pinks,  over 


14+  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

which  bend  with  blossoms  brilliant  against  the  pale 
blue  sky  the  rose-flowered  oleander,  the  scarlet- 
flowered  pomegranate  ;  also  aviaries  and  cages  full  of 
odd  and  harmless  creatures,  ferrets,  guinea  pigs,  por- 
cupines, squirrels,  and  monkeys  ;  arbours  where  wife,, 
daughters,  and  daughters-in-law  may  sew  and  make 
music  ;  and  neat  lawns  where  the  young  men  may 
play  at  quoits,  football,  or  swordsticks  and  bucklers  ; 
and  then,  sweeping  all  round  the  house  and  gardens 
and  terraces  an  undulating  expanse  of  field  and 
orchard,  smoke-tinted  with  olive,  bright  green  in  spring 
with  budding  crops,  russet  in  autumn  with  sere  vines  ; 
and  from  which,  in  the  burning  noon,  rises  the  in- 
cessant sawing  noise  of  the  cicalas,  and  ever  and  anon 
the  high,  nasal,  melancholy  chant  of  the  peasant,  lying 
in  the  shade  of  barn  door  or  fig  tree  till  the  sun  shall 
sink  and  he  can  return  to  his  labour.  If  the  house  in 
town,  with  its  spacious  store-rooms,  its  carved  chapel, 
and  painted  banqueting  hall,  large  enough  to  hold 
sons'  children  and  brothers'  wives  and  grandchildren, 
and  a  whole  host  of  poor  relatives,  whom  the  wise 
father  (as  Pandolfini  teaches)  employs  rather  than 
strangers  for  his  clerks  and  overseers — if  this  town 
house  was  the  pride  of  the  Italian  burgess  ;  the  villa, 
with  its  farms  and  orchards,  was  the  real  joy,  the 
holiday  paradise  of  the  over-worked  man.  To  read  in 
the  cool  house,  with  cicala's  buzz  and  fountain  plash 
all  round,  the  Greek  and  Latin  authors  ;  to  discuss 
them  with  learned  men  ;  to  watch  the  games  of  the 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  145 

youths  and  the  children,  this  was  the  reward  for  years 
of  labour  and  inteUigence  ;  but  sweeter  than  all  this 
(how  we  feel  it  in  Agnolo  Pandolfini's  speeches  !)  were 
those  occupations  which  the  city  could  not  give  :  the 
buying  and  selling  of  plants,  grain,  and  kine,  the 
meddling  with  new  grafted  trees,  the  mending  of 
spaliers,  the  straightening  of  fences,  the  going  round 
(with  the  self-importance  and  impatience  of  a  cockney) 
to  see  what  flowers  had  opened,  what  fruit  had  ripened 
over-night ;  to  walk  through  the  oliveyards,  among 
the  vines  ;  to  pry  into  stable,  pig-stye,  and  roosting- 
place,  taking  up  handfuls  of  drying  grain,  breaking 
twigs  of  olives,  to  see  how  things  were  doing  ;  and  to 
have  long  conversations  with  the  peasants,  shrewd 
enough  to  affect  earnest  attention  when  the  master 
was  pleased  to  vent  his  town-acquired  knowledge  of 
agriculture  and  gardening.  Sweet  also,  doubtless,  for 
younger  folk,  or  such  perhaps  as  were  fonder  of 
teaching  new  lute  tunes  to  the  girls  than  of  examining 
into  cabbages,  and  who  read  Dante  and  Boccaccio 
more  frequently  than  Cicero  or  Sallust — though  sweet 
perhaps  only  as  a  vague  concomitant  of  their  lazy 
pleasures,  to  listen  to  those  songs  of  the  peasantry 
rising  from  the  fields  below,  while  lying  perhaps  on 
one's  back  in  the  shaded  grass,  watching  the  pigeons 
whirring  about  the  belvedere  tower.  Vaguely  pleasant 
this  also,  doubtless  ;  but  for  a  long  while  only  vaguely. 
For,  during  more  than  two  centuries,  the  burgesses  of 
Italy  were  held  enthralled  by  the  Courtly  poets  of 

II 


•146  EVPHORION. 

other  countries  ;  listening  to,  and  reading,  at  first, 
only  Provengals  and  Sicilians,  or  Italians,  like  Bor- 
dello, pretending  to  be  of  Provence  or  Sicily  ;  and 
even  later,  enduring  in  their  own  poets,  their  own 
Guittones,  Cavalcantis,  Cinos,  Guinicellis,  nay  even  in 
Dante  and  Petrarch's  lyrics,  only  the  repetition  (how- 
ever vivified  by  genius)  of  the  old  common-places  of 
Courtly  love,  and  artificial  spring,  of  the  poetry  of 
feudal  nations.  But  the  time  came  when  not  only 
Provencal  and  Sicilian,  but  even  Tuscan,  poetry  was 
neglected,  when  the  revival  of  Greek  and  Latin  letters 
made  it  impossible  to  rewrite  the  threadbare  mediaeval 
prettinesses,  or  even  to  write  in  earnest  in  the  modern 
tongue,  so  stiff  and  thin  (as  it  seemed)  and  like  some 
grotesque  painted  saint,  when  compared  with  the 
splendidly  fleshed  antique  languages,  turning  and 
twining  in  graceful  or  solemn  involutions,  as  of  a 
Pyrrhic  or  a  maidens'  dance.  And  it  was  during  this 
-period,  from  Petrarch  to  Politian,  that,  as  philologists 
have  now  proved  beyond  dispute,  the  once  fashionable 
chivalric  romance,  and  the  poetry  of  the  Provencal, 
and  Sicilian  school,  cast  off  by  the  upper  classes,  was 
gradually  picked  up  by  the  lower  and  especially  by 
the  rural  classes.  Vagabond  ballad-singers  and  story- 
tellers— creatures  who  wander  from  house  to  house, 
mending  broken  pottery,  collecting  rags  or  selling 
small  pedlar's  wares — were  the  old  clothesmen  who 
carried  about  these  bits  of  tarnished  poetic  finery. 
The  people  of  the  town,  constantly  in  presence  of  the 


THE  O  UTDOOR  POE TR  V.  1 47 

upper  classes,  and  therefore  sooner  or  later  aware  of 
what  was  or  was  not  in  fashion,  did  not  care  long  for 
the  sentimental  daintiness  of  mediaeval  poetry  ;  be- 
sides, satire  and  scurrility  are  as  inevitable  in  a  town 
as  are  dogs  in  gutters  and  cats  on  roofs  ;  and  the 
townsfolk  soon  set  their  own  buffoonish  or  satirical 
ideas  to  whatever  remained  of  the  music  of  mediaeval 
poetry :  already  early  in  the  fifteenth  century  the 
sonnet  had  become  for  the  Florentine  artizans  a  mere 
scurrilous  epigram.  It  was  different  in  the  country. 
The  peasant,  at  least  the  Tuscan  peasant,  is  eminently 
idealistic  and  romantic  in  his  literary  tastes  ;  it  may 
be  that  he  has  not  the  intellectual  life  required  for  any 
utterances  or  forms  of  his  own,  and  that  he  conse- 
quently accepts  poetry  as  a  ready-made  ornament, 
something  pretty  and  exotic,  which  is  valued  in  pro- 
portion to  its  prettiness  and  rarity.  Be  the  reason 
whatever  it  may,  certain  it  is  that  nothing  can  be  too 
artificial  or  high-flown  to  please  the  Italian  peasantry  : 
its  tales  are  all  of  kings,  princesses,  fairies,  knights, 
winged  horses,  marvellous  jewels,  and  so  forth  ;  its 
songs  are  almost  without  exception  about  love,  con- 
stancy, moon,  stars,  flowers.  Such  things  have  not 
been  degraded  by  familiarity  and  parody  as  in  the 
town  ;  they  retain  for  the  country  folk  the  vague 
charm  (like  that  of  music,  automatic  and  indepen- 
dent of  thorough  comprehension)  of  belonging  to  a 
sphere  of  the  marvellous  ;  hence  they  are  repeated  and 
repeated   with  almost   religious   servility,  as  any  one 


148  EUPHORION. 

may  observe  who  will  listen  to  the  stories  and  verses 
told  and  sung  even  nowadays  in  the  Tuscan  country, 
or  who  will  glance  over  the  splendid  collections  of 
folklore  made  in  the  last  twenty  years.  Such  things 
must  suffer  alteration  from  people  who  can  neither 
read  nor  write,  and  who  cannot  be  expected  to 
remember  very  clearly  details  which,  in  many  cases, 
must  have  for  them  only  the  vaguest  meaning.  The 
stories  split  in  process  of  telling  and  re-telling,  and 
are  completed  with  bits  of  other  stories  ;  details  are 
forgotten  and  have  to  be  replaced  ;  the  same  happens 
with  poetry  :  songs  easily  get  jumbled  together,  their 
meaning  is  partially  obliterated,  and  has  to  be  restored  ; 
or,  again,  an  attempt  is  made  by  bold  men  to  adapt 
some  seemingly  adaptable  old  song  to  a  new  occasion  ; 
an  old  love  ditty  seems  fit  to  sing  to  a  new  sweetheart 
— names,  circumstances,  and  details  require  arranging 
for  this  purpose  ;  and  hence  more  alterations.  Now, 
however  much  a  peasant  may  enjoy  the  confused 
splendours  of  Court  life  and  of  Courtly  love,  he  cannot, 
with  the  best  will  in  the  world,  restore  their  details  or 
colouring  if  they  happen  to  become  obliterated.  If 
he  chance  to  forget  that  when  the  princess  first  met 
the  wizard  she  was  riding  forth  on  a  snow-white  jennet 
with  a  falcon  on  her  glove,  there  is  nothing  to  prevent 
his  describing  her  as  walking  through  the  meadow  in 
charge  of  a  flock  of  geese  ;  and  similarl}',  should  he 
happen  to  forget  that  the  Courtly  lover  compares  the 
skin  of  his  mistress  to  ivory  and  her  eyes  to  Cupid's 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  149 

torches,  he  is  quite  capable  of  filling  up  the  gap  by 
saying  that  the  girl  is  as  white  as  a  turnip  and  as 
bright-eyed  as  a  ferret.  As  with  details  of  description 
and  metaphors,  so  also  with  the  emotional  and  social 
parts  of  the  business.  The  peasant  has  not  been 
brought  up  in  the  idea  that  the  way  to  gain  a  woman's 
affection  is  to  stick  her  glove  on  a  helmet  and  perform 
deeds  of  prowess  closely  resembling  those  of  Don 
Quixote  in  the  Sierra  Morena  ;  so  he  attempts  to 
engratiate  himself  by  offering  her  presents  of  straw- 
berries, figs,  buttons,  hooks-and-eyes,  and  similar 
■desirable  things.  Again,  were  the  peasant  to  pay 
attentions  to  a  married  woman,  he  would  merely  get 
(what  noble  husbands  were  too  well  bred  to  dream  of) 
a  sound  horsewhipping,  or  perhaps  even  a  sharp  knife 
thrust  in  his  stomach  ;  so  that  he  takes  good  care  to 
address  his  love  songs  only  to  marriageable  young 
women.  In  this  way,  without  any  deliberate  attempt 
at  originality,  the  old  Courtly  poetry  becomes,  when 
once  removed  to  the  country,  thoroughly  patched  and 
seamed  with  rustic  ideas,  feelings,  and  images  ;  while 
never  ceasing  to  be,  in  its  general  stuff  and  shape,  of 
a  kind  such  as  only  professional  poets  of  the  upper 
classes  can  produce.  The  Sicilian  lyrics  collected  by 
Signor  Pitre,  still  more  the  Tuscan  poems  of  Tigri's 
charming  volume,  are,  therefore,  a  curious  mixture  of 
highflown  sentiment,  dainty  imagery,  and  most  artistic 
arrangements  of  metre  and  diction  (especially  in  the 
rispetto,  where  metrical  involution  is  accompanied  by 


I50  EUPHORION. 

logical  involution  of  the  most  refined  mediaeval  sort), 
with  hopes  and  complaints  such  as  only  a  farmer  could 
frame,  with  similes  and  descriptions  such  as  only  the 
business  of  the  field,  vineyard,  and  dairy  could  suggest. 
A  mixture,  but  not  a  jumble.  For  as  in  this  slow 
process  of  assimilation  and  alteration  only  that  was 
remembered  by  the  peasant  which  the  peasant  could 
understand  and  sympathize  with  ;  and  only  that  was 
welded  into  the  once  Courtly  poetry  which  was  suffi- 
ciently refined  to  please  the  people  who  delighted  in 
the  exotic  refinement — as,  in  short,  everything  came 
about  perfectly  simply  and  unconsciously,  there 
resulted  what  in  good  sooth  may  be  considered  as  a 
perfectly  substantive  and  independent  form  of  art, 
with  beauties  and  refinements  of  its  own.  And, 
indeed,  it  appears  to  me  that  one  might  say,  without 
too  much  paradox,  that  in  these  peasant  songs  only 
does  the  poetry  of  minnesingers  and  troubadours 
become  thoroughly  enjoyable  ;  that  only  when  the 
conventionality  of  feeling  and  imagery  is  corrected  by 
the  freshness,  the  straightforwardness,  nay,  even  the 
grotesqueness  of  rural  likings,  dislikings,  and  com- 
parisons, can  the  dainty  beauty  of  mediaeval  Courtly 
poetry  ever  really  satisfy  our  wishes.  Comparing 
together  Tigri's  collection  of  Tuscan  folk  poetry  with 
any  similar  anthology  that  might  be  made  of  middle 
high  German  and  Provencal,  and  early  Italian  lyrics, 
I  feel  that  the  adoption  of  Courtly  mediseval  poetry 
by  the   Italian  peasantry  of  the  Renaissance  can  be 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  151 

compared  more  significantly  than  at  first  seemed  with 
the  adoption  of  a  once  fashionable  garb  by  country 
folk.  The  peasant  pulled  about  this  Courtly  lyrism^ 
oppressively  tight  in  its  conventional  fit  and  starched 
with  elaborate  rhetorical  embroideries;  turned  it  inside 
out,  twisted  a  bit  here,  a  bit  there,  ripped  open  seam 
after  seam,  patched  and  repatched  with  stuffs  and 
stitches  of  its  own  ;  and  then  wore  the  whole  thing  as 
it  had  never  been  intended  to  be  worn  ;  until  this 
cast-off  poetic  apparel,  stretched  on  the  freer  moral 
limb^  of  natural  folk,  faded  and  stained  by  weather 
and  earth  into  new  and  richer  tints,  had  lost  all  its 
original  fashionable  stiffness,  and  crudeness  of  colour, 
and  niminy-piminy  fit,  and  had  acquired  instead  I 
know  not  what  grace  of  unexpectedness,  picturesque- 
ness,  and  ease.^ 

'  Any  one  who  is  sceptical  of  the  Courtly  derivation  of  the 
ItaHan  popular  song  rnay,  besides  consulting  the  admirable 
book  of  Prof.  d'Ancona,  compare  with  the  contents  of  Tigri's 
famous  "  Canti  popolari  Toscani,"  the  following  scraps  of 
Sicilian  and  early  Italian  lyrics  : — 

The  Emperor  Frederick  II.  writes  :  "  Rosa  di  maggio — 
Colorita  e  fresca — Occhi  hai  fini — E  non  rifini — Di  gioie  dare — 
Lo  tuo  parlare — La  gente  innamora— Castella  ed  altura." 

Jacopo  Pugliesi  says  of  his  lady  :  "  Chiarita  in  viso  piu  che 
argento — Donami  allegrezze — Ben  eo  son  morto — Emalcolto — ■ 
Se  non  mi  dai  conforto — Fior  deW  orto." 

Inghilfredi  Siciliano  :  "  Gesii  Cristo  ideolla  in  paradiso — 
E  poi  la  fece  angelo  incarnando — Gioia  aggio  preso  di  giglio 
novello — E  vago,  che  sormonta  ogni  ricchezza — Sua  dottrina 
m'  afifrezza — Cosi  mi  coglie  e  olezza — Come  pantera  le  bestie 
selvagge." 

Jacopo  da  Lentino  :   "  E  di  virtute  tutte  1'  altre  avanza — E 


152  EUPHORION. 

Well  ;  for  many  a  year  did  the  song  of  the  peasants 

rise  up  from  the  fields  and  oliveyards  unnoticed  by 

the  good  townsfolk  taking  their  holiday  at  the  Tuscan 

villa  ;  but  one  day,  somewhere  in  the  third  quarter 

of  the  fifteenth  century,  the  long-drawn  chant  of  the 

rispetto,  telling  perhaps  how  the  singer's  sweetheart 

was  beautiful  as  the  star  Diana,  so  beautiful  as  a  baby 

that  the  Pope  christened  her  with  his  own  hands ;  the 

quavering  nasal  cadence  of  the  stornello  saying  by 

chance — 

Flower  of  the  Palm,  iScc, 

did  at  last  waken  the  attention  of  one  lettered  man, 
a  man  of  curious  and  somewhat  misshapen  body  and 
mind,  of  features  satyr-like  in  ugliness,  yet  moody 
and  mystical  in  their  very  earthiness  ;  a  man  essen- 
tially of  the  senses,  yet  imperfect  in  them,  without 
taste  or  smell,  and,  over  and  above,  with  a  marvellously 
supple  intellect ;  weak  and  coarse  and  idealistic  ;  and 
at  once  feebly  the  slave  of  his  times,  and  so  boldly, 
spontaneously  innovating  as  to  be  quite  unconscious 

somigliante  a  Stella  e  di  splendore — Colla  sua  conta  {cf.  Pro- 
verKjal  coindeta,  gentille)  e  gaia  innamoranza — E  piu  bella  e 
che  rosa  e  che  fiore — Cristo  le  doni  vita  ed  allegranza — E  si  la 
cresca  in  gran  pregio  ed  onore." 

I  must  finish  off  what  might  be  a  much  longer  collection 
with  a  charming  little  scrap,  quite  in  rispetto  tone,  by 
Guinicelli  :  "  Vedut  'ho  la  lucente  stella  diana — Ch'  appare  anzi 
che  '1  giorno  renda  albore — Ch'  a  preso  forma  di  figura  umana — 
Sovr'  ogni  altra  mi  par  che  dia  splendore — Viso  di  neve  colorato 
in  grana — Occhi  lucenti,  gai  e  pien  d'amore — Non  credo  che 
nel  mondo  sia  cristiana — Si  plena  di  beltate  e  di  valore/' 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  153 

of  innovation  :  the  mixed  nature,  or  rather  the  nature 
in  many  heterogeneous  bits,  of  the  man  of  letters  who 
is  artistic  almost  to  the  point  of  being  an  actor,  natural 
in  every  style  because  morally  connected  with  no 
style  at  all.  The  man  was  Lorenzo  di  Piero  dei  Medici, 
for  whom  posterity  has  exclusively  reserved  the  civic 
title  of  all  his  family  and  similar  town  despots,  calling 
him  the  Magnificent.  It  is  the  fashion  at  present  to 
give  Lorenzo  only  the  leavings,  as  it  were,  of  our 
admiration  for  the  weaker,  less  original,  nay,  consider- 
ably enervate,  humanistic  exquisite  Politian  ;  and 
this  absurd  injustice  appears  to  me  to  show  that  the 
very  essence  and  excellence  of  Lorenzo  is  not  now- 
adays perceived.  The  Renaissance  produced  several 
versatile  and  charming  poets  ;  and,  in  the  midst  of 
classic  imitation,  one  or  two,  of  whom  one  is  certainly 
Boiardo,  of  real  freshness  and  raciness.  But  of  this 
new  element  in  the  Renaissance,  this  element  which 
is  neither  imitation  of  antiquity  nor  revival  of  mediaeval, 
which  is  original,  vital,  fruitful,  in  short,  modern, 
Lorenzo  is  the  most  versatile  example.  He  is  new. 
Renaissance,  modern  ;  not  merely  in  this  or  that 
quality,  he  is  so  all  round.  And  this  in  the  first  place 
because  he  is  so  completely  the  man  of  impressions ; 
the  man  not  uttering  wonderful  things,  nor  elaborat- 
ing exquisite  ones,  but  artistically  embodying  with 
marvellous  versatility  whatever  strikes  his  fancy  and 
feeling — fancy  and  feeling  which  are  as  new  as  the 
untouched  sculptor's  clay.     And   this  extraordinary 


154-  EUPHORION. 

temper  of  art  for  art's  sake,  or  rather  effect  for  effect 
and  form's  sake,  was  possible  in  that  day  only  in 
a  man  equally  without  strong  passions,  and  without 
strong  convictions.  He  is  naturally  attracted  most  by 
what  is  most  opposed  to  the  academic,  Virgilian, 
Horatian,  or  Petrarchesque  sestheticism  of  his  contem- 
poraries ;  he  is  essentially  a  realist,  and  all  the  effects 
which  he  produces,  all  the  beauty,  charm,  or  beastliness 
of  his  work,  corresponds  to  beauty,  charm,  or  beastli- 
ness in  the  reality  of  things.  If  Lorenzo  writes  at  one 
moment  carnival  songs  of  ribald  dirtiness,  at  the 
next  hymns  full  of  holy  solemnity  ;  it  is,  I  think, 
merely  because  this  versatile  artist  takes  pleasure  in 
trying  whether  his  face  may  not  be  painted  into  grin- 
ning drunkenness,  and  then  elongated  and  whitened 
into  ascetic  gentleness.  Instead  of  seeking,  like  most 
of  his  contemporaries,  to  be  Greek,  Roman,  or  medi- 
aeval by  turns,  he  preferred  trying  on  all  the  various 
tricks  of  thought  and  feeling  which  he  remarked 
among  his  unlettered  townsfolk.  His  realism  naturally 
drew  him  towards  the  classes  where  realism  can  deal 
with  the  real ;  and  not  the  affected,  the  self-conscious, 
the  deliberately  attempted.  Hence  those  wonderful 
little  poems,  the  carnival  songs  of  the  gold-thread 
spinners,  of  the  pastry-cooks,  of  the  shoemakers, 
which  give  us  so  completely,  so  gracefully,  the  whole 
appearance,  work,  manner,  gesture  of  the  people  ; 
give  them  to  us  with  ease  and  rapidity  so  perfect,  that 
we  scarcely  know  how  they  are  given  ;  that  we  almost 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  155 

forget  verses  and  song,  and  actually  see  the  pulling, 
twisting,  and  cutting  of  the  gold-threads  ;  that  we  see 
and  hear  the  shoemaker's  hands  smoothing  down  the 
leather  of  the  shoe  in  his  hand,  to  convince  his  cus- 
tomers of  its  pliability  ;  that  we  see  and  smell  the 
dear  little  pale  yellow  pasties  nestling  in  the  neat 
white  baskets,  after  having  stood  by  and  watched  the 
dough  being  kneaded,  chopped,  and  floured  over,  the 
iron  plates  heated  in  the  oven,  the  soft,  half-baked 
paste  twisted  and  bent ;  nay,  we  feel  almost  as  if  we 
had  eaten  of  them,  those  excellent  things  which  seem 
such  big  mouthfuls  but  are  squeezed  and  crunched  at 
one  go  like  nothing  at  all.  Hence,  I  mean  from 
this  love  of  watching  effects  and  reproducing  them, 
originated  also  the  masterpiece  of  Lorenzo  dei  Medici. 
the  "  Nencia  da  Barberino." 

This  poem,  of  some  fifty  octaves,  is  the  result  of 
those  Tuscan  peasant  songs,  of  which  I  have  told  you 
the  curious  Courtly  descent,  at  last  having  struck  the 
fancy  of  a  real  poet.  It  is,  what  Lorenzo's  masterpiece 
necessarily  must  be,  in  the  highest  degree  a  modern 
performance ;  as  modern  as  a  picture  by  Bastien 
Lepage  ;  as  an  opera,  founded  upon  local  music,  b}' 
Bizet.  For  it  is  not  by  any  manner  of  means  a 
pastoral,  a  piece  of  conventional  poetic  decoration, 
with  just  a  little  realistic  detail,  more  of  the  mere 
conventional  or  more  of  the  realistic  dominating 
according  as  it  is  a  pastoral  by  Theocritus,  or  a  pastoral 
by  Ouinault  or  Metastasio.     It  is  the  very  reverse  of 


156  EUPHORION. 

this :  it  is  the  attempt  to  obtain  a  large  and  complete, 
detailed  and  balanced  impression  by  the  cunning 
arrangement  of  a  number  of  small  effects  which  the 
artist  has  watched  in  reality ;  it  is  the  making  into  a 
kind  of  little  idyl,  something  half  narrative,  half  drama, 
with  distinct  figures  and  accessories  and  background, 
of  a  whole  lot  of  little  fragments  imitated  from,  the 
peasant  poetry,  and  set  in  thin,  delicate  rims  of 
imitation  no  longer  of  the  peasant's  songs,  but  of  the 
peasant's  thoughts  and  speech  ;  a  perfect  piece  of 
impressionist  art,  marred  only  in  rare  places  by  an 
attempt  (inevitable  in  those  days)  to  force  the  drawing 
and  colour  into  caricature.  The  construction,  which 
appears  to  be  nowhere,  is  in  reality  a  masterpiece  ; 
for,  without  knowing  it,  you  are  shown  the  actors,  the 
background,  the  ups  and  downs  of  temper,  the  variation 
of  the  seasons  ;  above  all  you  are  shown  the  heroine 
through  the  medium  of  the  praises,  the  complaints, 
the  narratives  of  the  past,  the  imaginings  of  the 
future,  of  the  hero,  whose  incoherent  rhapsodizing 
constitutes  the  whole  poem.  He,  Vallera,  is  a  well- 
to-do  young  farmer  ;  she,  Nencia,  is  the  daughter  of 
peasant  folk  of  the  castellated  village  of  Barberino  in 
the  Mugello ;  he  is  madly  in  love,  but  shy,  and  (to  all 
appearance)  awkward,  so  that  we  feel  convinced  that 
oi  all  these  speeches  in  praise  of  his  Nenciozza,  in 
blame  of  her  indifference,  highly  poetic  flights  and  most 
practical  adjurations  to  see  all  the  advantages  of  a 
good  match,  the  young  woman  hears  few  or  none ; 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  157 

Valltfra  is  talking  not  to  her,  but  at  her,  or  rather, 
he  is  rehearsing  to  himself  all  the  things  which  he 
cannot  squeeze  out  in  her  presence.  It  is  the  long 
day-dream,  poetic,  prosaic,  practical,  and  imaginative, 
of  a  love-sick  Italian  peasant  lad,  to  whom  his 
sweetheart  is  at  once  an  ideal  thing  of  beauty,  a 
goddess  at  whose  shrine  songs  must  be  sung  and 
wreaths  twined  ;  and  a  very  substantial  lass,  who 
cannot  be  indifferent  to  sixpenny  presents,  and  whom 
he  cannot  conceive  as  not  ultimately  becoming  the 
sharer  of  his  cottage,  the  cooker  of  his  soup,  the 
mender  of  his  linen,  the  mother  of  his  brats — a  dream 
in  which  image  is  effaced  by  image,  and  one  thought 
is  expelled,  unfinished,  by  another.  She  is  to  him 
like  the  Fairy  Morgana,  the  fairy  who  kept  so  much 
of  chivalry  in  her  enchanted  island  ;  she  is  like  the 
evening  star  when  above  his  cottage  it  slowly  pierces 
the  soft  blue  sky  with  its  white  brilliancy  ;  she  is  purer 
than  the  water  in  the  well,  and  sweeter  than  the 
malmsey  wine,  and  whiter  than  the  miller's  flour  ;  but 
her  heart  is  as  hard  as  a  pebble,  and  she  loves  driving 
to  distraction  a  whole  lot  of  youths  who  dangle  behind 
her,  captives  of  those  heart-thievish  eyes  of  hers.  But 
she  is  also  a  most  excellent  housewife,  can  stand  any 
amount  of  hard  field  labour,  and  makes  lots  of  money 
by  weaving  beautiful  woollen  stuff  To  see  her  going 
to  church  of  a  morning,  she  is  a  little  pearl !  her 
bodice  is  of  damask,  and  her  petticoat  of  bright 
colour,  and  she  kneels  down  carefully  where  she  may 


T5S  EUPHORION. 

be  seen,  being  so  smart.  And  then,  when  she  dances! 
— a  born  dancer,  bouncing  like  a  little  goat,  and 
twirling  more  than  a  mill-w^heel ;  and  when  she  has 
finished  she  makes  you  such  a  curtsey ;  no  citizen's 
wife  in  Florence  can  curtsey  as  she  does.  It  was  in 
April  that  he  first  fell  in  love.  She  was  picking  salad 
in  the  garden  ;  he  begged  her  for  a  little,  and  she  sent 
him  about  his  business.  Alas,  alas  !  ever  since  then 
his  peace  has  been  gone  ;  he  cannot  sleep,  he  can  only 
think  of  her,  and  follow  her  about ;  he  has  become  quite 
good-for-nothing  as  to  his  field  work, — yet  he  hears  all 
the  people  around  laughing  and  saying,  "  Of  course 
Vallera  will  get  her."  Only  sJu  will  pay  no  heed  to 
him.  She  is  finer  to  look  at  than  the  Pope,  whiter  than 
the  whitest  wood  core  :  she  is  more  delectable  than  are 
the  young  figs  to  the  earwigs,  more  beautiful  than  the 
turnip  flower,  sweeter  than  honey.  He  is  more  in  love 
with  her  than  the  moth  is  in  love  with  the  lamp ;  she  loves 
to  see  him  perishing  for  her.  If  he  could  cut  himself 
in  two  without  too  much  pain,  he  would,  just  to  let 
her  see  that  he  carries  her  in  his  heart.  No  ;  he  would 
cut  out  his  heart,  and  when  she  has  touched  it  with 
that  slender  hand  of  hers,  it  would  cry  out,  "  Nencia, 
Nencia  bella."  But,  after  all,  he  is  not  to  be  despised  : 
he  is  an  excellent  labourer,  most  learned  in  buying 
and  selling  pigs,  he  can  play  the  bagpipe  beautifully  ; 
he  is  rich,  is  willing  to  go  to  any  expense  to  please 
her,  nay,  even  to  pay  the  barber  double  that  his  hair 
may  be  nice  and  fuzzy  from  the  crimping  irons  ;  and 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  159 

if  only  he  were  to  get  himself  tight  hose  and  a  silk 
jerkin,  he  would  be  as  good  as  any  Florentine  burgess. 
But  she  will  not  listen  ;  or,  rather,  she  listens  and  laughs. 
Yes,  she  sits  up  in  bed  at  night  and  laughs  herself  to 
death  at  the  mere  thought  of  him,  that  is  all  he  gets. 
But  he  knows  what  it  is !  There  is  a  fellow  who  will 
keep  sneaking  about  her  ;  if  Vallera  only  catch  him 
near  his  cottage,  won't  he  give  him  a  taste  of  his  long 
new  knife  !  nay,  rip  him  up  and  throw  his  bowels,  like 
those  of  a  pig,  to  dry  on  a  roof !  He  is  sorry — perhaps 
he  bores  her — God  bless  you,  Nencia  ! — he  had  better 
go  and  look  after  his  sheep. 

All  this  is  not  the  poetry  of  the  Renaissance 
peasant ;  it  is  the  poem  made  out  of  his  reality  ;  the 
songs  which  Vallera  sang  in  the  fields  about  his  Nencia 
we  must  seek  in  the  volume  of  Tigri  ;  those  rispetti  and 
stornelli  of  to-day  are  the  rispetti  and  stornelli  of  four 
centuries  ago ;  they  are  much  more  beautiful  and  poetic 
than  any  of  Lorenzo's  work  ;  but  Lorenzo  has  given  us 
not  merely  a  peasant's  love-song;  he  has  given  us  a 
peasant's  thoughts,  actions,  hopes,  fears  ;  he  has  given 
us  the  peasant  himself,  his  house,  his  fields,  and  his 
sweetheart,  as  they  exist  even  now.  For  Lorenzo  is 
gone,  and,  greater  than  he,  the  paladins  and  ladies  of 
Boiardo  and  Ariosto,  have  followed  the  saints  and 
virgins  of  Dante  into  the  limbo  of  fair  unrealities  ;  and 
the  very  Greek  and  Roman  heroes  of  a  hundred  years 
ago,  the  very  knights  and  covenanters  of  forty  years 
•since,have  joined  them ;  but  Vallera  exists  still^and  still 


i6o  EUPHORION. 

in  the  flesh  exists  his  Nenciozza.  Everything  changes, 
except  the  country  and  the  peasant.  For,  in  the  long 
farms  of  Southern  Tuscany,  with  double  row  of  black- 
ened balcony  all  tapestried  with  heavy  ingots  of  Indian 
corn,  and  spread  out  among  the  olives  of  the  hillside,  up 
which  twists  the  rough  bullock  road  protected  by  its  vine 
trellis  ;  and  in  the  little  farms,  with  queer  hood-shaped 
double  roofs  (as  if  to  pull  over  the  face  of  the  house 
when  it  blows  hard),  and  pigeon  towers  which  show 
that  some  day  they  must  have  been  fortified,  all  about 
Florence  ;  farms  which  I  pass  every  day,  with  their 
sere  trees  all  round,  their  rough  gardens  of  bright 
dahlias  and  chrysanthemums  draggled  by  the  autumn 
rains — in  these  there  are,  do  not  doubt  it,  still 
Nencias :  magnificent  creatures,  fit  models  for  Ama- 
zons, only  just  a  trifle  too  full-blown  and  matronly  ;  but 
with  real  Amazonian  limbs,  firm  and  delicate,  under 
their  red  and  purple  striped  cotton  frocks  ;  creatures 
with  heads  set  on  necks  like  towers  or  columns,  necks 
firm  set  in  broad,  well-fleshed  chest  as  branches  in  a 
tree's  trunk  ;  great  penthouses  of  reddish  yellow  or 
lustreless  black  crimped  hair  over  the  forehead  ;  the  fore- 
head, like  the  cheeks,  furrowed  a  good  deal — perhaps  we 
dainty  people  might  say,  faded  and  wrinkled  by  work 
in  the  burning  sun  and  the  wind  ;  women  whom  you 
see  shovelling  bread  into  the  heated  ovens,  or  plashing 
in  winter  wilh  bare  arms  in  half-frozen  streams,  or 
digging  up  a  turnip  field  in  the  drizzle ;  or  on  a 
Sunday,  standing   listless  by  their   door,  surrounded 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  i6i 

by  rolling  and  squalling  brats,  and  who,  when  they 
slowly  look  up  at  the  passer-by,  show  us,  on  those 
monumental  faces  of  theirs,  a  strange  smile,  a  light 
of  bright  eyes  and  white  teeth  ;  a  smile  which  to  us 
sophisticated  townspeople  is  as  puzzling  as  certain 
sudden  looks  in  some  comely  animal,  but  which  yet 
makes  us  understand  instinctively  that  we  have  before 
us  a  Nencia  ;  and  that  the  husband  yonder,  though  he 
now  swears  at  his  wife,  and  perhaps  occasionally  beats 
her,  has  nev-ertheless,  in  his  day,  dreamed,  argued^ 
raged,  and  sung  to  himself  just  like  Lorenzo's  Vallera. 
The  "  Nencia  da  Barberino  "  is  certainly  Lorenzo  del 
Medici's  masterpiece  :  it  is  completely  and  satisfac- 
torily worked  out.  Yet  we  may  strain  possibilities  to 
the  point  of  supposing  (which,  however,  I  cannot  for  a 
moment  suppose)  that  this  "  Nencia  "  is  a  kind  of  fluke  ; 
that  by  an  accident  a  beautiful  and  seemingly  apprecia- 
tive poem  has  resulted  where  the  author,  a  mediaeval 
realist  of  a  superior  Villon  sort,  had  intended  only  a 
piece  of  utter  grotesqueness.  But  important  as  is  the 
"  Nencia,"  Lorenzo  has  left  behind  him  another  poem, 
greatly  inferior  in  completeness,  but  which  settles 
beyond  power  of  doubt  that  in  him  the  Renaissance 
was  not  merely  no  longer  medieval,  but  most  intensely 
modern.  This  poem  is  the  "  Ambra."  It  is  simply  an 
allegorical  narrative  of  the  inundation,  by  the  river 
Ombrone,  of  a  portion,  called  Ambra,  of  the  great 
Medicean  villa  of  Poggio  a  Caiano.  Lorenzo's  object 
was  evidently  to  write  a  semi-Ovidian  poem,  of  a  kind 

12 


1 62  EUPHORION. 

common  in  his  day,  and  common  almost  up  to  our 
own  :  a  river-god,  bearded,  crown  of  reeds,  urn,  general 
dampness  and  uproariousness  of  temper  all  quite  cor- 
rect ;  and  a  nymph,  whom  he  pursues,  who  prays  to  the 
Virgin  huntress  to  save  her  from  his  love,  and  who, 
just  in  the  nick  of  time,  is  metamorphosed  into  a 
mossy  stone,  dimly  showing  her  former  woman's 
shape  ;  the  style  of  thing,  charming,  graceful,  insipid, 
of  which  every  one  can  remember  a  dozen  instances, 
and  which  immediately  brings  up  to  the  mind  a  vision 
of  grand-ducal  gardens,  where,  among  the  clipped  ilexes 
and  the  cypress  trunks,  great  lumbering  water-gods 
and  long-limbed  nymphs  splash,  petrified  and  covered 
with  melancholy  ooze  and  yellow  lichen,  among  the 
stagnant  grotto  waters.  In  some  respects,  therefore, 
there  is  in  the  "  Ambra "  somewhat  more  artificial, 
more  barrocco  than  that  early  Renaissance  of  Politian 
and  Pontano  would  warrant.  There  also  several  bits, 
half  graceful,  half  awkward,  pedantic,  constrained, 
childish,  delightful,  like  the  sedge-crowned  rivers 
telling  each  other  anecdotes  of  the  ways  and  customs 
of  their  respective  countries,  and  especially  the  charm- 
ing dance  of  zephyr  with  the  flowers  on  the  lawns  of 
Cyprus,  which  must  immediately  suggest  pictures  by 
Piero  di  Cosimo  and  by  Botticelli.  So  far,  therefore, 
there  is  plenty  to  enjoy,  but  nothing  to  astonish,  in 
the  "Ambra."  But  the  Magnificent  Lorenzo  has  had 
the  extraordinary  whim  of  beginning  his  allegory  with 
a  description,  twenty-one  stanzas  long,  of  the  season 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  163 

of  floods.  A  description,  full  of  infinitely  delicate 
minute  detail  :  of  the  plants  which  have  kept  their 
foliage  while  the  others  are  bare — the  prickly  juniper, 
the  myrtle  and  bay  ;  of  the  flocks  of  cranes  printing  the 
sky  with  their  queer  shapes,  of  the  fish  under  the  ice, 
and  the  eagle  circling  slowly  round  the  ponds — little 
things  which  affect  us  mixed  up  as  they  are  with 
all  manner  of  stiff  classic  allusions,  very  much  as  do 
the  carefully  painted  daisies  and  clover  among  the 
embossed  and  gilded  unrealities  of  certain  old  pictures. 
From  these  rather  finikin  details,  Lorenzo  passes, 
however,  to  details  which  are  a  good  deal  more  than 
details,  things  little  noticed  until  almost  recently :  the 
varying  effect  of  the  olives  on  the  hillside — a  grey, 
green  mass,  a  silver  ripple,  according  as  the  wind  stirs 
them  ;  the  golden  appearance  of  the  serene  summer 
air,  and  so  forth  ;  details  no  longer,  in  short,  but 
essentially,  hov/ever  minute,  effects.  And  then, 
suddenly  leaving  such  things  behind,  he  rushes  into 
the  midst  of  a  real  picture,  a  picture  which  you  might 
call  almost  impressionistic,  of  the  growth  of  rivers 
and  the  floods.  The  floods  are  a  grand  sight  ;  more 
than  a  sight — a  grand  performance,  a  drama  ;  some- 
times, God  knows,  a  tragedy.  Last  night,  under  a 
warm,  hazy  sky,  through  whose  buff-tinted  clouds 
the  big  moon  crept  in  and  out,  the  mountain  stream 
was  vaguely  visible — a  dark  riband  in  its  wide  shingly 
bed,  when  the  moon  was  hidden  ;  a  narrow,  shallow, 
broken  stream,  sheets  of  brilliant  metallic  sheen,  and 


1 64  EUPHORION. 

showers  of  sparkling  facets,  when  the  moon  was  out ; 
a  mere  drowsy  murmur  mixing  with  the  creaking  and 
rustling  of  dry  reeds  in  the  warm,  wet  wind.  Thus 
in  the  evening.  Look  down  from  your  window  next 
morning.  A  tremendous  rushing  mass  of  waters,  thick, 
turbid,  reddish,  with  ominous  steel-like  lustre  where 
its  coppery  surface  reflects  the  moist  blue  sky,  now 
fills  the  whole  bed,  shaking  its  short  fringe  of  foam, 
tossing  the  spray  as  it  swirls  round  each  still  projecting 
stone,  angrily  tugging  at  the  reeds  and  alders  which 
flop  their  draggled  green  upon  its  surface  ;  eddying 
faster  and  faster,  encircling  each  higher  rock  or  sand- 
bank, covering  it  at  last  with  its  foaming  red  mass. 
Meanwhile,  the  sky  is  covered  in  with  vaporous  grey 
clouds,  which  enshroud  the  hills  ;  the  clear  runnels 
dash  over  the  green  banks,  spirt  through  the  walls, 
break  their  way  across  the  roads  ;  the  little  mountain 
torrents,  dry  all  summer,  descend,  raging  rivers,  red 
with  the  hill  soil  ;  and  with  every  gust  of  warm  wind 
the  river  rises  higher  and  rushes  along  tremendously 
impetuous.  Down  in  the  plain  it  eats  angrily  at  the 
soft  banks,  and  breaks  its  muddy  waters,  fringed  on 
the  surface  with  a  sort  of  ominous  grime  of  broken 
wood  and  earth,  higher  and  higher  against  the  pier- 
heads of  the  bridges  ;  shaking  them  to  split  their 
masonr}',  while  crowds  of  men  and  women  look  on, 
staring  at  the  rising  water,  at  the  planks,  tables,  beams, 
cottage  thatches,  nay,  whole  trees,  which  it  hurls  at 
the   bridge   piers.     And    then,  perhaps,  the   terrible^ 


THE  OUTDOOR  POETRY.  165 

soft,  balmy  flood-wind  persisting,  there  comes  suddenly 
the  catastrophe  ;  the  embankment,  shaken  by  the 
resistless  current,  cracks,  fissures,  gives  way  ;  and  the 
river  rushes  into  the  city,  as  it  has  already  rushed  into 
the  fields,  to  spread  in  constantly  rising,  melancholy 
livid  pools,  throughout  the  streets  and  squares. 

This  Lorenzo  saw,  and,  wonderful  to  say,  in  this 
soiled  and  seething  river,  in  these  torn  and  crumbling 
banks,  in  all  the  dreadfulness  of  these  things,  he  saw 
a  beauty  and  a  grandeur.  But  he  saw  not  merely  the 
struggle  of  the  waters  and  of  the  land  ;  he  —  the 
heartless  man  who  laid  his  hand  even  upon  the  saved- 
up  money  of  orphan  girls  in  order  to  keep  up  the 
splendour  of  his  house  and  of  his  bank — saw  the  mis- 
fortunes of  the  peasantry  ;  the  mill,  the  cottage  by  the 
riverside,  invaded  by  the  flood  ;  the  doors  burst  open  by 
the  tremendous  rushing  stream,  the  stables  and  garners 
filled  with  the  thick  and  oozy  waters ;  the  poor 
creatures,  yesterday  prosperous,  clinging  to  the  roof, 
watching  their  sheep  and  cows,  their  hay,  and  straw, 
and  flour,  the  hemp  bleached  in  the  summer,  the 
linen  spun  and  woven  in  the  long  winter,  their- 
furniture  and  chattels,  their  labour  and  their  hope, 
whirled  along  by  the  foaming  river. 

Thus  by  this  versatile  Lorenzo  dei  Medici,  this 
flippant,  egotistic  artist  and  despot,  has  at  last  been 
broken  the  long  spell  of  the  Middle  Ages.  The 
Renaissance  has  sung  no  longer  of  knights  and  of 
spring,  but  of  peasants  and  of  autumn.     An  immoral 


1 66  EUPHORION. 

and  humanistic  time,  an  immoral  and  humanistic 
man,  have  had  at  length  a  heart  for  the  simpler,  ruder, 
less  favoured  classes  of  mankind ;  an  eye  for  the 
bolder,  grander,  more  solemn  sights  of  Nature :  modern 
times  have  begun,  modern  sympathies,  modern  art  are 
in  full  swing. 


SYMMETRIA   PRISCA. 


SYMMETRIA    PRISCA. 


Mirator  veterum,  discipuluoque  memor, 

Defuit  una  mihi  symmetria  prisca.     Peregi 
Quod  potui  ;  Veniam  da  mihi,  posteritas. 

— Lionardo  da  Vinci's  epitaph  by  P latino  Piatto. 

Into  the  holy  enclosure  which  had  received  the 
precious  shiploads  of  earth  from  Calvary,  the  Pisans 
of  the  thirteenth  century  carried  the  fragments  of 
ancient  sculpture  brought  from  Rome  and  from 
Greece ;  and  in  the  Gothic  cloister  enclosing  the 
green  sward  and  dark  cypresses  of  the  graveyard  of 
Pisa,  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages  came  for  the  first 
time  face  to  face  with  the  art  of  Antiquity.  There, 
among  pagan  sarcophagi  turned  into  Christian  tombs, 
with  heraldic  devices  chiselled  on  their  arabesques 
and  vizored  helmets  surmounting  their  garlands,  the 
great  unsigned  artist  of  the  fourteenth  century, 
Orcagna  of  Florence,  or  Lorenzetti  of  Siena,  painted 
the  typical  masterpiece  of  mediaeval  art,  the  great 
fresco   of  the   Triumph    of  Death.     With  wonderful 


I70  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

realization  of  character  and  situation  he  painted  the 
prosperous   of  the    world,   the   dapper    youths   and 
damsels    seated  with  dogs  and   falcons  beneath  the 
orchard  trees,  amusing  themselves  with  Decameronian 
tales  and  sound  of  lute  and  psaltery,  unconscious  of 
the  colossal  scythe  wielded  by  the  gigantic  dishevelled 
the  scythe  wielded  by  the  dishevelled  angel  of  Deaths 
and  which,  in  a  second,  will  descend  and  mow  them 
to  the  ground  ;  while  the  crowd  of  beggars,  ragged, 
maimed,    paralyzed,    leprous,     grovelling     on     their 
withered    limbs,    see    and    implore    Death,    and    cry 
stretching  forth  their  arms,   their  stumps,  and  their 
crutches.     Further   on,   three    kings    in  embroidered 
robes    and     gold-trimmed    shovel     caps,    Lewis    the 
Emperor,  Uguccione  of  Pisa,  and  Castruccio  of  Lucca^ 
with  their  retinue  of  ladies  and  squires,  and  hounds 
and  hawks,  are  riding  quietly  through  a  wood.     Sud- 
denly their  horses  stop,  draw  back  ;  the  Emperor's 
bay  stretches  out  his  long  neck  sniffing  the  air ;  the 
kings  strain  forward  to  see,  one  holding  his  nose  for 
the   stench   of  death   which  meets  him  ;  and  before 
them  are  three  open   coffins,   in  which   lie,  in  three 
loathsome  stages  of  corruption,  from  blue  and  bloated 
putrescence  to  well-nigh  fleshless  decay,  three  kingly 
corpses.     This  is  the  triumph  of  Death  ;  the  grim  and 
consolatory  jest  of  the  Middle  Ages:  equality  in  decay; 
kings,  emperors,  ladies,  knights,  beggars,  and  cripples, 
this    is  what  we  all   come  to  be,   stinking   corpses  ; 
Death,  our  lord,  our  only  just  and  lasting  sovereign, 
reigns  impartially  over  all. 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  171 

But  opposite,  all  along  the  sides  of  the  painted 
cloister,  the  Amazons  are  wrestling  with  the  youths 
on  the  stone  of  the  sarcophagi ;  the  chariots  are  dash- 
ing forward,  the  Tritons  are  splashing  in  the  marble 
waves  ;  the  Maenads  are  striking  their  timbrels  in 
their  dance  with  the  satyrs  ;  the  birds  are  pecking  at 
the  grapes,  the  goats  are  nibbling  at  the  vines  ;  all  is 
life,  strong  and  splendid  in  its  marble  eternity.  And 
the  mutilated  Venus  smiles  towards  the  broken 
Hermes  ;  the  stalwart  Hercules,  resting  against  his 
club,  looks  on  quietly,  a  smile  beneath  his  beard  ;  and 
the  gods  murmur  to  each  other,  as  they  stand  in  the 
cloister  filled  with  earth  from  Calvary,  where  hundreds 
of  men  lie  rotting  beneath  the  cypresses,  "  Death  will 
not  triumph  for  ever  ;  our  day  will  come." 

We  have  all  seen  them  opposite  to  each  other,  these 
two  arts,  the  art  born  of  Antiquity  and  the  art  born 
of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  but  whether  this  meeting  was 
friendly  or  hostile  or  merely  indifferent,  is  a  question 
of  constant  dispute.  To  some,  mediseval  art  has 
appeared  being  led,  Dante-like,  by  a  magician  Virgil 
through  the  mysteries  of  nature  up  to  a  Christian 
Beatrice,  who  alone  knows  the  paths  of  the  kingdom 
of  heaven  ;  others  have  seen  mediaeval  art,  like  some 
strong,  chaste  Sir  Gu}-on  turning  away  resolutely  from 
the  treacherous  sorceress  of  Antiquity,  and  pursuing 
solitarily  the  road  to  the  true  and  the  good  ;  for  some 
the  antique  has  been  an  impure  goddess  Venus, 
seducing   and    corrupting    the   Christian    artist  ;    the 


172  EUPHORION. 

antique  has  been  for  others  a  glorious  Helen,  an  un- 
attainable perfection,  pursued  forever  by  the  mediaeval 
craftsman,  but  seized  by  him  only  as  a  phantom. 
Magician  or  witch  ;  voluptuous,  destroying  Venus  or 
cold  and  ungrasped  Helen  ;  what  was  the  antique  to 
this  art  born  of  the  Middle  Ages  and  developed  during 
the  Renaissance?  Was  the  relation  between  them 
that  of  tuition,  cool  and  abstract ;  of  fruitful  love  ;  or 
of  deluding  and  damning  example  ? 

The  art  which  came  to  maturity  in  the  late  fifteenth 
and  early  sixteenth  centuries  was  generated  in  the 
early  mediaeval  revival.  The  seeds  may,  indeed,  have 
come  down  from  Antiquity,  but  they  remained  for 
nearly  a  thousand  years  hidden  in  the  withered,  rot- 
ting remains  of  former  vegetation  ;  and  it  was  not 
till  that  vegetation  had  completely  decomposed  and 
become  part  of  the  soil,  it  was  not  till  putrefaction 
had  turned  into  germination,  that  artistic  organism 
timidly  reappeared.  The  new  art-germ  developed 
with  the  new  civilization  which  surrounded  it.  Manu- 
facture and  commerce  reappeared  :  the  artizans  and 
merchants  formed  into  communities  ;  the  communi- 
ties grew  into  towns,  the  towns  into  cities.  In  the 
city  arose  the  cathedral ;  the  Lombard  or  Byzantine 
mouldings  and  traceries  of  the  cathedral  gave  birth  to 
figure-sculpture  ;  its  mosaics  gave  birth  to  painting  ; 
every  forward  movement  of  the  civilization  unfolded 
as  it  were  a  new  form  or  detail  of  the  art,  until,  when 
mediaeval    civilization  was  reaching   its    moment   of 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  173 

consolidation,  when  the  cathedrals  of  Lucca  and  Pisa 
stood  completed,  when  Niccolo  and  Giovanni  Pisano 
had  sculptured  their  pulpits  and  sepulchres  ;  painting, 
in  the  hands  of  Cimabue  and  Duccio,  of  Giotto  and 
of  Guido  da  Siena,  freed  itself  from  the  tradition  of 
the  mosaicists  as  sculpture  had  freed  itself  from  the 
practice  of  the  stone-masons,  and  stood  forth  an  in- 
dependent and  organic  art. 

Thus  painting  was  born  of  a  new  civilization,  and 
grew  by  its  own  vital  force  ;  a  thing  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  original  and  spontaneous.  But  contempo- 
raneous with  the  mediaeval  revival  was  the  resuscita- 
tion of  Antiquity  ;  in  proportion  as  the  new  civilization 
developed,  the  old  civilization  was  exhumed  ;  real 
Latin  began  to  be  studied  only  when  real  Italian 
began  to  be  written  ;  Dante,  Petrarca,  and  Boccaccio 
were  at  once  the  founders  of  modern  literature  and 
the  exponents  of  the  literature  of  Antiquity ;  the 
strong  young  Present  was  to  profit  by  the  experience 
of  the  Past. 

As  it  was  with  literature,  so  it  likewise  was  with 
art.  The  most  purely  mediaeval  sculpture,  the  sculp- 
ture which  has,  as  it  were,  just  detached  itself  from 
the  capitals  and  porches  of  the  cathedral,  is  the  direct 
pupil  of  the  antique ;  and  the  three  great  Gothic 
sculptors,  Niccolo,  Giovanni,  and  Andrea  of  Pisa,  learn 
from  fragments  of  Greek  and  Roman  sculpture  how 
to  model  the  figure  of  the  Redeemer  and  how  to 
drape    the    robe    of    our  Lady.      This    spontaneous 


174  EUPHORION. 

mediaeval  sculpture,  aided  by  the  antique,  preceded 
by  a  full  half-century  the  appearance  of  mediaeval 
painting  ;  and  thanks  to  the  study  of  the  works  of 
the  Pisan  sculptors  that  Cimabue  and  Giotto  learned 
to  depart  from  the  mummified  monstrosities  of  the 
hieratic  Byzantine  and  Roman  style  of  Giunta  and 
Berlinghieri.  Thus,  through  the  sculpture  of  the 
Pisans  the  painting  of  the  school  of  Giotto  received 
at  second-hand  the  teachings  of  Antiquity.  Sculpture 
had  created  painting  ;  painting  now  belonged  to  the 
painters.  In  the  hands  of  Giotto  it  developed  within 
a  few  years  into  an  art  which  seemed  almost  mature, 
an  art  dealing  victoriously  with  its  materials,  trium- 
phantly solving  its  problems,  executing  as  if  by 
miracle  all  that  was  demanded  of  it.  But  Giottesque 
art  appeared  perfect  merely  because  it  was  limited  ; 
it  did  all  that  was  required  of  it,  because  the  required 
was  little;  it  was  not  asked  to  reproduce  the  real  nor 
to  represent  the  beautiful  ;  it  was  asked  merely  to 
suggest  a  character,  a  situation,  a  story. 

The  artistic  development  of  a  nation  has  its 
parallel  in  the  artistic  development  of  an  individual. 
The  child  uses  his  pencil  to  tell  a  story,  satisfied  with 
balls  and  sticks  as  body,  head,  and  legs,  provided  he 
and  his  friends  can  associate  with  them  the  ideas  in 
their  minds.  The  youth  sets  himself  to  copy  what  he 
sees,  to  reproduce  forms  and  effects,  without  any  aim 
beyond  the  mere  pleasure  of  copying.     The  mature 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  175 

artist  strives  to  obtain  forms  and  effects  of  which  he 
approves ;  he  seeks  for  beauty.  In  the  life  of  Italian 
painting  the  generation  of  men  who  flourished  at  the 
beginning  of  the  sixteenth  century  are  the  mature 
artists  ;  the  men  of  the  fifteenth  century  are  the  inex- 
perienced youths  ;  the  Giottesques  are  the  children — 
children  Titanic  and  seraph-like,  but  children  never- 
theless ;  and,  like  all  children,  learning  more  perhaps 
in  their  few  years  than  can  the  youth  and  the  man 
learn  in  a  lifetime. 

Like  the  child,  the  Giottesque  painter  wished  to 
show  a  situation  or  illustrate  a  story,  and  for  this 
purpose  the  absolute  realization  of  objects  was  un- 
necessary, Giottesque  art  is  not  incorrect  art,  it  is 
generalized  art  ;  it  is  an  art  of  mere  outline.  The 
Giottesques  could  draw  with  great  accuracy  the  hand  : 
the  form  of  the  fingers,  the  bend  of  the  limb,  they 
•could  give  to  perfection  its  whole  gesture  and  move- 
ment, they  could  produce  a  correct  and  spirited  outline ; 
but  within  this  correct  outline  marked  off  in  dark  paint, 
there  is  but  a  vague,  uniform  mass  of  pale  colour ;  the 
body  of  the  hand  is  missing,  and  there  remains  only  its 
ghost,  visible  indeed,  but  unsubstantial,  without  weight 
or  warmth,  eluding  the  grasp.  The  difference  between 
this  spectre  hand  of  the  Giottesques,  and  the  sinewy, 
muscular  hand  which  can  shake  and  crush  of  IMasaccic 
and  Signorelli ;  or  the  soft  hand  with  throbbing  pulse 
and  warm  pressure  of  Perugino  and  Bellini, — this 
difference  is  t\-pical  of  the  difference  between  the  art 


176  EUPHORION. 

of  the  fourteenth  century  and  the  art  of  the  fifteenth 
century :  the  first  suggests,  the  second  realizes  ;  the 
one  gives  impalpable  outlines,  the  other  gives  tangible 
bodies.  The  Giottesque  cares  for  the  figure  only 
inasmuch  as  it  displays  an  action  ;  he  reduces  it  to  a 
semblance,  a  phantom,  to  the  mere  exponent  of  an 
idea  ;  the  man  of  the  Renaissance  cares  for  the  figure 
inasmuch  as  it  is  a  living  organism,  he  gives  it 
substance  and  makes  it  stand  out  as  an  animate 
reality.  Thence,  despite  its  early  triumphs,  the 
Giottesque  style,  by  its  inherent  nature,  forbade 
any  progress  ;  it  reached  its  limits  at  once,  and  the 
followers  of  Giotto  look  almost  as  if  they  were  his 
predecessors,  for  the  simple  reason  that,  being  unable 
to  advance,  they  were  forced  to  retrograde.  The 
limited  amount  of  artistic  realization  required  to- 
present  to  the  mind  of  the  spectator  a  situation  or 
an  allegory,  had  been  obtained  by  Giotto  himself,  and 
bequeathed  by  him  to  his  followers  ;  who,  finding  it 
more  than  sufficient  for  their  purposes,  and  having  no 
love  of  form  and  reality  for  their  own  sake  as  an 
incentive  to  further  acquisition,  worked  on  with  their 
master's  materials,  composing  and  recomposing,  but 
adding  nothing  of  their  own.  Giotto  had  observed 
Nature  with  passionate  interest,  because,  although  its 
representation  was  only  a  means  to  an  end,  it  was  a 
means  which  required  to  be  mastered  ;  and  as  such 
became  in  itself  a  sort  of  secondary  aim  ;  but  the 
followers  of  Giotto  merely   utilized  his  observations 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  177 

of  Nature,  and  in  so  doing  gradually  conventionalized 
and  debased  these  second-hand  observations.  Giotto's 
forms  are  wilfully  incomplete,  because  they  aim  at 
mere  suggestion,  but  they  are  not  conventional  :  they 
are  diagrams,  not  symbols,  and  thence  it  is  that  Giotto 
seems  nearer  to  the  Renaissance  than  do  his  latest 
followers,  not  excepting  even  Orcagna.  Painting,, 
which  had  made  the  most  prodigious  strides  from 
Giunta  to  Cimabue,  and  from  Cimabue  to  Giotto,  had 
got  enclosed  within  a  vicious  circle,  in  which  it  moved 
for  nearly  a  century  neither  backwards  nor  forwards  : 
painters  were  satisfied  with  suggestion  ;  and  as  long 
as  they  were  satisfied,  no  progress  was  possible. 

From  this  Giottesque  treadmill,  painting  was  released 
by  the  intervention  of  another  art.  The  painters  were 
hopelessly  mediocre ;  their  art  was  snatched  from  them 
by  the  sculptors.  Orcagna  himself,  perhaps  the  only 
Giottesque  who  gave  painting  an  onward  push,  had 
modelled  and  cast  one  of  the  bronze  gates  of  the 
Florence  baptistery  ;  the  generation  of  artists  who 
arose  at  the  beginning  of  the  fifteenth  century,  and 
who  opened  the  period  of  the  Renaissance,  were 
sculptors  or  pupils  of  sculptors.  When  we  see  these 
vigorous  lovers  of  nature,  these  heroic  searchers  after 
truth,  suddenly  pushing  aside  the  decrepit  Giottesque 
allegory-mongers,  we  ask  ourselves  in  astonishment 
whence  they  have  arisen,  and  how  those  broken-down 
artists  of  effete  art  could  have  begotten  such  a  gene- 
ration of  giants.     Whence  do  they  come  ?     Certainly 

13 


yyS  EUPHORION. 

not  from  the  studios  of  the  Giottesques.  No,  they  issue 
out  of  the  workshops  of  the  stone-mason,  of  the 
goldsmith,  of  the  worker  in  bronze,  of  the  sculptor. 
Vasari  has  preserved  the  tradition  that  Masolino  and 
Paolo  Uccello  were  apprentices  of  Ghiberti ;  he  has 
remarked  that  their  greatest  contemporary,  Masaccio, 
"  trod  in  the  steps  of  Brunelleschi  and  of  Donatello." 
Pollaiolo  and  Verrocchio  we  know  to  have  been  equally 
excellent  as  painters  and  as  workers  in  bronze.  Sculp- 
ture, at  once  more  naturalistic  and  more  constantly 
under  the  influence  of  the  antique,  had  for  the  second 
time  laboured  for  painting.  Itself  a  subordinate  art, 
without  much  vitality,  without  deep  roots  in  the  civili- 
zation, sculpture  was  destined  to  remain  the  unsuc- 
cessful pupil  of  the  antique,  and  the  unsuccessful 
irival  of  painting ;  but  sculpture  had  for  its  mission  to 
prepare  the  road  for  painting  and  to  prepare  painting 
for  antique  influence ;  and  the  noblest  work  of  Ghiberti 
and  Donatello  was  Masaccio,  as  the  most  lasting  glory 
to  the  Pisani  had  been  Giotto. 

With  Masaccio  began  the  study  of  nature  for  its 
■own  sake,  the  desire  of  reproducing  external  objects 
without  any  regard  to  their  significance  as  symbols 
or  as  parts  of  a  story ;  the  passionate  wish  to  arrive 
at  absolute  realization.  The  merely  suggestive  out- 
line art  of  the  Giottesques  had  come  to  an  end  ;  the 
suggestion  became  a  matter  of  indiflerence,  the  reali- 
zation became  a  paramount  interest  ;  the  story  was 
forgotten    in   the  telling,  the   religious  thought   was 


SYMM±.l  RIA  P  RISC  A.  179 

lost  in  the  search  for  the  artistic  form.  The  Giot- 
tesques  had  used  debased  conventionalism  to  represent 
action  with  wonderful  narrative  and  logical  power  ; 
the  artists  of  the  early  Renaissance  became  unskilful 
narrators  and  foolish  allegorists  almost  in  proportion 
as  they  became  skilful  draughtsmen  and  colourists  ; 
the  saints  had  become  to  Masaccio  merely  so  many 
lay  figures  on  to  which  to  cast  drapery ;  for  Fra  Filippo 
the  Madonna  was  a  mere  peasant  model ;  for  Filippino 
Lippi  and  for  Ghirlandajo,  a  miracle  meant  merely  an 
opportunity  of  congregating  a  number  of  admirable 
portrait  figures  in  the  dress  of  the  day  ;  the  Baptism 
for  Verrocchio  had  significance  only  as  a  study  of 
muscular  legs  and  arms  ;  and  the  sacrifice  of  Noah 
had  no  importance  for  Uccello  save  as  a  grand  op- 
portunity for  foreshortenings.  In  the  hands  of  the 
Giottesques,  interested  in  the  subject  and  indifferent 
to  the  representation,  painting  had  remained  stationary 
for  eighty  years  ;  for  eighty  years  did  it  develope  in 
the  hands  of  the  men  of  the  fifteenth  century,  indif- 
ferent to  the  subject  and  passionately  interested  in 
the  representation.  The  unity,  the  appearance  of 
comparative  perfection  of  the  art  had  disappeared 
with  the  limits  within  which  the  Giottesques  had 
been  satisfied  to  move  ;  instead  of  the  intelligible 
and  solemn  conventionalism  of  the  Giottesques,  we 
see  only  disorder,  half-understood  ideas  and  abortive 
attempts,  confusion  which  reminds  us  of  those  enig- 
matic sheets  on   which  Leonardo  or  Michael  Ancelo 


i8o  EUPHORION. 

scrawled  out  their  ideas — drawings  within  drawings, 
plans  of  buildings  scratched  over  Madonna  heads, 
single  flowers  upside  down  next  to  flayed  arms,  calcu- 
lations, monsters,  sonnets ;  a  very  chaos  of  thoughts 
and  of  shapes,  in  which  the  plan  of  the  artist  is 
inextricably  lost,  which  mean  everything  and  nothing, 
but  out  of  whose  unintelligible  network  of  lines  and 
curves  have  issued  masterpieces,  and  which  only  the 
foolish  or  the  would-be  philosophical  would  exchange 
for  some  intelligible,  hopelessly  finished  and  finite 
illustration  out  of  a  Bible  or  a  book  of  travels. 

Anatomy,  perspective,  colour,  drapery,  effects  of 
light,  of  water,  of  shadow,  forms  of  trees  and  flowers, 
converging  lines  of  architecture,  all  this  at  once  ab- 
sorbed and  distracted  the  attention  of  the  artists  of 
the  early  Renaissance;  and  while  they  studied,  copied, 
and  calculated,  another  thought  began  to  haunt  them, 
another  eager  desire  began  to  pursue  them  :  by  the  side 
of  Nature,  the  manifold,  the  baffling,  the  bewildering, 
there  rose  up  before  them  another  divinity,  another 
sphinx,  mysterious  in  its  very  simplicity  and  serenity 
— the  Antique. 

The  exhumation  of  the  antique  had,  as  we  have 
seen,  been  contemporaneous  with  the  birth  of  painting ; 
nay,  the  studj^  of  the  remains  of  antique  sculpture 
had,  in  contributing  to  form  Niccolo  Pisano,  indirectly 
helped  to  form  Giotto ;  the  very  painter  of  the  Triumph 
of  Death  had  inserted  into  his  terrible  fresco  two- 
winged  genii,  upholding  a  scroll,  copied  without  any 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  i8i 

alteration  from  some  coarse  Roman  sarcophagus,  in 
which  they  may  have  sustained  the  usual  Dis  Manibus 
Sacrum.  There  had  been,  on  the  part  of  both  sculptors 
and  painters,a  constant  study  of  the  antique ;  but  during 
the  Giottesque  period  this  study  had  been  limited  to 
technicalities,  and  had  in  no  way  affected  the  concep- 
tion of  art.  The  mediaeval  artists,  surrounded  by 
physical  deformities,  and  seeing  sanctity  in  sickness 
and  dirt,  little  accustomed  to  observe  the  human  figure, 
were  incapable,  both  as  men  and  as  artists,  of  at  all 
entering  into  the  spirit  of  antique  art.  They  could 
not  perceive  the  superior  beauty  of  the  antique  ;  they 
could  recognize  only  its  superior  science  and  its 
superior  handicraft,  and  these  alone  they  studied  to 
obtain. 

Giovanni  Pisano  sculpturing  the  unfleshed,  caried 
carcases  of  the  devils  who  leer,  writhe,  crunch,  and 
tear  on  the  outside  of  Orvieto  Cathedral  ;  and  the 
Giottesques  painting  those  terrible  green,  macerated 
Christs,  hanging  livid  and  broken  from  the  cross 
which  abound  in  Tuscany  and  Umbria  ;  the  artists 
who  produced  these  loathsome  and  lugubrious  works 
were  indubitably  students  of  the  antique  ;  but  they 
had  learned  from  it  not  a  love  for  beautiful  form  and 
noble  drapery,  but  merely  the  general  shape  of  the 
limbs  and  the  general  fall  of  the  garments  :  the 
anatomical  science  and  technical  processes  of  Anti- 
quity were  being  used  to  produce  the  most  intensely 
un-antique,  the  most  intensely  mediaeval  works.     Thus 


1 82  EUPHORION. 

matters  stood  in  the  time  of  Giotto.  His  followers, 
who  studied  only  arrangement,  probably  consulted 
the  antique  as  little  as  they  consulted  nature ;  but 
the  contemporary  sculptors  were  brought  by  the  very 
constitution  of  their  art  into  close  contact  both  with 
Nature  and  with  the  antique  ;  they  studied  both  with 
determination,  and  handed  over  the  results  of  their 
labours  to  the  sculptor-taught  painters  of  the  fifteenth 
century. 

Here,  then,  were  the  two  great  factors  in  the  art  of 
the  Renaissance — the  study  of  nature,  and  the  study 
of  the  Antique  :  both  understand  slowly,  imperfectly ; 
the  one  counteracting  the  effect  of  the  other  ;  the 
study  of  nature  now  scaring  away  all  antique  influence, 
the  study  of  the  antique  now  distorting  all  imitation 
of  nature ;  rival  forces  confusing  the  artist  and  marring 
the  work,  until,  when  each  could  receive  its  due,  the 
one  corrected  the  other,  and  they  combined,  producing 
by  this  marriage  of  the  living  reality  with  the  dead 
but  immortal  beauty,  the  great  art  of  Michael  Angelo, 
of  Raphael,  and  of  Titian  :  double,  like  its  origin, 
antique  and  modern,  real  and  ideal. 

The  study  of  the  antique  is  thus  placed  opposite 
to  the  study  of  nature,  the  comprehension  of  the 
works  of  Antiquity  is  the  momentary  antagonist  of 
the  comprehension  of  the  works  of  nature.  And  this 
may  seem  strange,  when  we  consider  that  antique  art 
was  itself  due  to  perfect  comprehension  of  nature. 
But  the  contradiction  is  easily  explained.     The  study 


SYMMETRIA  P RISC  A.  185 

of  nature,  as  it  was  carried  on  in  the  Renaissance,, 
comprised  the  study  of  effects  which  had  remained 
unnoticed  by  Antiquity  ;  and  the  study  of  thestatue, 
colourless,  without  Hght,  shade,  or  perspective,  ham- 
pered, and  was  hampered  by,  the  study  of  colour,  of 
light  and  shade,  of  perspective,  and  of  all  that  a  gene- 
ration of  painters  would  seek  to  learn  from  nature. 
Nor  was  this  all  ;  the  influence  of  the  civilization  of 
the  Renaissance,  of  a  civilization  directly  issued  from 
the  Middle  Ages,  was  entirely  at  variance  with  the 
influence  of  antique  civilization  through  the  medium 
of  ancient  art ;  the  Middle  Ages  and  Antiquity, 
Christianity  and  Paganism,  were  even  more  opposed 
to  each  other  than  could  be  the  statue  and  the  easel 
picture,  the  fresco  and  the  bas-relief 

First,  then,  we  have  the  hostility  between  painting 
and  sculpture,  between  the  modus  operandi  of  the 
modern  and  the  modus  operandi  of  the  ancient  art. 
Antique  art  is,  in  the  first  place,  purely  linear  art, 
colourless,  tintless,  without  light  and  shade  ;  next,  it 
is  essentially  the  art  of  the  isolated  figure,  without 
background,  grouping,  or  perspective.  As  linear  art 
it  could  directly  affect  only  that  branch  of  painting 
which  was  itself  linear ;  and  as  art  of  the  isolated 
figure  it  was  ever  being  contradicted  by  the  constantly 
developing  arts  of  perspective  and  landscape.  The 
antique  never  directly  influenced  the  Venetians,  not 
from  reasons  of  geography  and  culture,  but  from 
the  fact   that  Venetian   painting,  founded  from    the 


f84  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

earliest  times  upon  a  system  of  colour,  could  not  be 
affected  by  antique  sculpture,  based  upon  a  system  of 
modelled,  colourless  form  ;  the  men  who  saw  form  only 
through  the  medium  of  colour  could  not  learn  much 
from  purely  linear  form  ;  hence  it  is  that  even  after  a 
certain  amount  of  antique  imitation  had  passed  into 
Venetian  painting,  through  the  medium  of  Mantegna, 
the  Venetian  painters  display  comparatively  little 
antique  influence.  In  Bellini,  Carpaccio,  Cima,  and 
other  early  masters,  the  features,  forms,  and  dress  are 
mainly  modern  and  Venetian  ;  and  Giorgione,  Titian, 
and  even  the  eclectic  Tintoret,  were  more  interested 
in  the  bright  lights  of  a  steel  breastplate  than  in  the 
shape  of  a  limb  ;  and  preferred  in  their  hearts  a  shot 
brocade  of  the  sixteenth  century  to  the  finest  drapery 
ever  modelled  by  an  ancient. 

The  antique  influence  was  naturally  strongest 
among  the  Tuscan  schools  ;  because  the  Tuscan 
schools  were  essentially  schools  of  drawing,  and  the 
draughtsman  recognized  in  antique  sculpture  the  high- 
est perfection  of  that  linear  form  which  was  his  own 
domain.  Yet  while  the  antique  appealed  most  to  the 
linear  schools,  even  in  these  it  could  strongly  influence 
only  the  purely  linear  part  ;  it  is  strong  in  the  draw- 
ings and  weak  in  the  paintings.  As  long  as  the 
artists  had  only  the  pencil  or  pen,  they  could  repro- 
duce much  of  the  linear  perfection  of  the  antique  ; 
they  were,  so  to  speak,  alone  with  it  ;  but  as  soon  as 
they  brought  in  colour,  perspective,  and  scenery,  the 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  185 

linear  perfection  was  lost  in  attempts  at  something 
new  ;  the  antique  was  put  to  flight  by  the  modern. 
Botticelli's  crayon  study  for  his  Venus  is  almost 
antique  ;  his  tempera  picture  of  Venus,  with  the  pale 
blue  scaly  sea,  the  laurel  grove,  the  flower-embroidered 
garments,  the  wisps  of  tawny  hair,  is  comparatively 
mediaeval  ;  Pinturicchio's  sketch  of  Pans  and  satyrs 
contrasts  strangely  with  his  frescoes  in  the  library  ot 
Siena  ;  Mantegna  himself,  supernaturally  antique  in 
his  engravings,  becomes  comparatively  trivial  and 
modern  in  his  oil-paintings.  Do  what  they  might, 
draw  from  the  antique  and  calculate  its  proportions, 
the  artists  of  the  Renaissance  found  themselves  baffled 
as  soon  as  they  attempted  to  apply  the  result  of  their 
linear  studies  to  coloured  pictures  ;  as  soon  as  they 
tried  to  make  the  antique  unite  with  the  modern,  one 
of  the  two  elements  was  sure  to  succumb.  In  Botti- 
celli, draughtsman  and  student  though  he  was,  the 
modern,  the  mediaeval,  that  part  of  the  art  which  had 
arisen  in  the  Middle  Ages,  invariably  had  the  upper 
hand  ;  his  Venus,  despite  her  forms  studied  from  the 
antique  and  her  gesture  imitated  from  some  earlier 
discovered  copy  of  the  Medicean  Venus,  has  the  woe- 
begone prudery  of  a  Madonna  or  of  an  abbess  ;  she 
shivers  physically  and  morally  in  her  unaccustomed 
nakedness,  and  the  goddess  of  Spring,  who  comes 
skipping  up  from  beneath  the  laurel  copse,  does  well 
to  prepare  her  a  mantle,  for  in  the  pallid  tempera 
colour,  against  the  dismal  background  of  rippled  sea, 


1 86  EUPHORION. 

this  medieval  Venus,  at  once  indecent  and  prudish,  is 
no  very  pleasing  sight.  In  the  Allegory  of  Spring  in 
the  Academy  of  Florence,  we  again  have  the  antique  ; 
goddesses  and  nymphs  whose  clinging  garments  the 
gentle  Sandro  Botticelli  has  assuredly  studied  from 
some  old  statue  of  Agrippina  or  Faustina  ;  but  what 
strange  livid  tints  are  there  beneath  those  draperies, 
what  eccentric  gestures  are  those  of  the  nymphs,  what 
a  green,  ghostlike  light  illumines  this  garden  of 
Venus  !  Are  these  goddesses  and  nymphs  immortal 
women  such  as  the  ancients  conceived,  or  are  they  not 
rather  fantastic  fairies  or  nixen,  Titanias  and  Undines, 
incorporeal  daughters  of  dew  and  gossamer  and  mist  ? 
In  Sandro  Botticelli  the  teachings  of  the  statue  are 
forgotten  or  distorted  when  the  artist  takes  up  his 
palette  and  brushes  ;  in  his  greater  contemporary, 
Andrea  Mantegna,  the  ever-present  antique  chills  and 
arrests  the  vitality  of  the  modern,  Mantegna,  the 
pupil  of  the  ancient  marbles  of  Squarcione's  workshop 
even  more  than  the  pupil  of  Donatello,  studies  for  his 
paintings  not  from  nature,  but  from  sculpture  ;  his 
figures  are  seen  in  strange  projection  and  foreshorten- 
ing, like  figures  in  a  high  relief  seen  from  below  ; 
despite  his  mastery  of  perspective,  they  seem  hewn 
out  of  the  background  ;  despite  the  rich  colours  which 
he  displays  in  his  Veronese  altar-piece,  they  look  like 
painted  marbles,  with  their  hard  clots  of  stonelike 
hair  and  beard,  with  their  vacant  glance  and  their 
wonderful  draperies,  clinging  and   weighty  like   the 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  187 

wet  draperies  of  ancient  sculpture.  They  are  beautiful 
petrifactions,  or  vivified  statues  ;  Mantegna's  master- 
piece, the  sepia  "Judith"  in  Florence,  is  Hke  an  ex- 
quisite, pathetically  lovely  Eurydice,  who  has  stepped 
unconscious  and  lifeless  out  of  a  Praxitelian  bas-relief. 
And  there  are  stranger  works  than  even  the  Judith; 
strange  statuesque  fancies,  like  the  fight  of  Marine 
Monsters  and  the  Bacchanal  among  Mantegna's  en- 
gravings. The  group  of  three  wondrous  creatures,  at 
once  men,  fish,  and  gods,  is  as  grand  and  even  more 
fantastic  than  Leonardo's  Battle  of  the  Standard  :  a 
Triton,  sturdy  and  muscular,  with  sea-weed  beard  and 
hair,  wheels  round  his  finned  horse,  preparing  to  strike 
his  adversary  with  a  bunch  of  fish  which  he  brandishes 
above  him  ;  on  him  is  rushing,  careering  on  an 
osseous  sea-horse,  a  strange,  lank,  sinewy  being,  fury 
stretching  every  tendon,  his  long-clawed  feet  striking 
into  the  flanks  of  his  steed,  his  sharp,  reed-crowned 
head  turned  fiercely,  with  clenched  teeth,  on  his  oppo- 
nent, and  stretching  forth  a  truncheon,  ready  to  run 
down  his  enemy  as  a  ship  runs  down  another  ;  and 
further  off  a  young  Triton,  with  clotted  hair  and' 
heavy  eyes,  seems  ready  to  sink  wounded  below  the 
rippling  wavelets,  with  the  massive  head  and  marble 
agony  of  the  dying  Alexander  ;  enigmatic  figures, 
grand  and  grotesque,  lean,  haggard,  vehement,  and 
yet,  in  the  midst  of  violence  and  monstrosity,  un- 
accountably antique.  The  other  print,  called  the 
Bacchanal,  has   no  background  :  half  a  dozen  male 


i88  EUPHORION. 

figures  stand  separate  and  naked  as  in  a  bas-relief. 
Some  are  leaning  against  a  vine-wreathed  tub  ;  a 
satyr,  with  acanthus-leaves  growing  wondrously  out  of 
him,  half  man,  half  plant,  is  emptying  a  cup  ;  a  heavy 
Silenus  is  prone  upon  the  ground  ;  a  faun,  seated 
upon  the  vat,  is  supporting  in  his  arms  a  beautiful 
sinking  youth  ;  another  youth,  grand,  muscular,  and 
grave  as  a  statue,  stands  on  the  further  side.  Is  this 
really  a  bacchanal  ?  Yes,  for  there  is  the  paunchy 
Silenus,  there  are  the  fauns,  there  the  vat  and  vine- 
wreaths  and  drinking-horns.  And  yet  it  cannot  be  a 
bacchanal.  Compare  with  it  one  of  Rubens's  orgies, 
where  the  overgrown,  rubicund  men  and  women  and 
fauns  tumble  about  in  tumultuous,  riotous  intoxica- 
tion :  that  is  a  bacchanal  ;  they  have  been  drinking, 
those  magnificent  brutes,  there  is  wine  firing  their 
blood  and  weighing  down  their  heads.  But  here  all 
is  different,  in  this  so-called  Bacchanal  of  Mantegna. 
This  heavy  Silenus  is  supine  like  a  mass  of  marble  ; 
these  fauns  are  shy  and  mute  ;  these  youths  are  grave 
and  sombre  ;  there  is  no  wine  in  the  cups,  there  are 
no  lees  in  the  vat,  there  is  no  life  in  these  magnificent 
colossal  forms  ;  there  is  no  blood  in  their  grandly 
bent  lips,  no  light  in  their  wide-opened  eyes  ;  it  is  not 
the  drowsiness  of  intoxication  which  is  weighing 
down  the  youth  sustained  by  the  faun  ;  it  is  no  grape- 
juice  which  gives  that  strange,  vague  glance.  No; 
they  have  drunk,  but  not  of  any  mortal  drink  ;  the 
grapes  are  grown  in  Persephone's  garden,  the  vat  con- 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  189 

tains  no  fruits  that  have  ripened  beneath  our  sun. 
These  strange,  mute,  solemn  revellers  have  drunk  of 
Lethe,  and  they  are  growing-  cold  with  the  cold  of 
death  and  of  marble  ;  they  are  the  ghosts  of  the  dead 
ones  of  antiquity,  revisiting  the  artist  of  the  Renais- 
sance, who  paints  them,  thinking  he  is  painting  life, 
while  that  which  he  paints  is  in  reality  death. 

This  anomaly,  this  unsatisfactory  character  of  the 
works  of  both  Botticelli  and  Mantegna,  is  mainly 
technical  ;  the  antique  is  frustrated  in  Botticelli,  not 
so  much  by  the  Christian,  the  mediaeval,  the  modern 
mode  of  feeling,  as  by  the  new  methods  and  aims  of 
the  new  art  which  disconcert  the  methods  and  aims  of 
the  old  art ;  and  that  which  arrests  Mantegna  in  his 
development  as  a  painter  is  not  the  spirit  of  Paganism 
deadening  the  spirit  of  Christianity,  but  the  laws  of 
sculpture  hampering  painting.  But  this  technical 
contest  between  two  arts,  the  one  not  yet  fully  deve- 
loped, the  other  not  yet  fully  understood,  is  as  nothing 
compared  with  the  contest  between  the  two  civili- 
zations, the  antique  and  the  modern  ;  between  the 
habits  and  tendencies  of  the  contemporaries  of  the 
artists  of  the  Renaissance  and  of  the  artists  them- 
selves, and  the  habits  and  tendencies  of  the  antique 
artists  and  their  contemporaries.  We  are  apt  to  think 
of  the  Renaissance  as  of  a  period  closely  resembling 
antiquity,  misled  by  the  inevitable  similarity  between 
southern  and  democratic  countries  of  whatever  age ; 
misled  still  less  pardonably  by  the  Ciceronian  pedan- 


igo  EUPHORION. 

tries  and  pseudo-antique  obscenities  of  a  few  human- 
ists, and  by  the  pseudo-Corinthian  arabesques  and 
capitals  of  a  few  learned  architects.  But  all  this  was 
mere  archaeological  finery  borrowed  by  a  civilization 
in  itself  entirely  unlike  that  of  ancient  Greece. 

The  Renaissance,  let  us  remember,  was  merely  the 
flowering  time  of  that  great  mediaeval  movement 
which  had  germinated  early  in  the  twelfth  century  ;  it 
was  merely  a  more  advanced  stage  of  the  civilization 
which  had  produced  Dante  and  Giotto,  of  the  civiliza- 
tion which  was  destined  to  produce  Luther  and  Rabe- 
lais. The  fifteenth  century  was  merely  the  continua- 
tion of  the  fourteenth  century,  as  the  fourteenth  had 
been  of  the  thirteenth  ;  there  had  been  growth  and 
improvement ;  development  of  the  more  modern, 
diminishing  of  the  more  mediaeval  elements  ;  but, 
■despite  growth  and  the  changes  due  to  growth,  the 
Renaissance  was  part  and  parcel  of  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  life,  thought,  aspirations,  and  habits  were  medi- 
aeval ;  opposed  to  the  open-air  life,  the  physical  train- 
ing and  the  materialistic  religion  of  Antiquity.  The 
surroundings  of  Masaccio  and  of  Signorelli,  nay,  even 
of  Raphael,  were  very  different  from  those  of  Phidias 
or  Praxiteles.  Let  us  think  what  were  the  daily  and 
hourly  impressions  given  by  the  Renaissance  to  its 
artists.  Large  towns,  in  which  thousands  of  human 
beings  were  crowded  together,  in  narrow,  gloomy 
streets,  with  but  a  strip  of  blue  visible  between  the 
projecting   roofs ;    and    in    these  cities    an    incessant 


SYMMETRIA  P RISC  A.  191 

commercial  activity,  with  no  relief  save  festivals  at  the 
churches,  brawls  at  the  taverns,  and  carnival  buffoon- 
eries. Men  and  women  pale  and  meagre  for  want  of 
air,  and  light,  and  movement ;  undeveloped,  untrained 
bodies,  warped  by  constant  work  at  the  loom  or  at 
the  desk,  at  best  with  the  lumpish  freedom  of  the 
soldier  and  the  vulgar  nimbleness  of  the  'prentice. 
And  these  men  and  women  dressed  in  the  dress  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  gorgeous  perhaps  in  colour,  but 
heavy,  miserable,  grotesque,  nay,  sometimes  ludicrous 
in  form  ;  citizens  in  lumpish  robes  and  long-tailed 
caps  ;  ladies  in  stiff  and  foldless  brocade  hoops  and 
stomachers ;  artizans  in  striped  and  close-adhering 
hose  and  egg-shaped  padded  jerkin  ;  soldiers  in  lum- 
bering armour-plates,  ill-fitted  over  ill-fitting  leather, 
a  shapeless  shell  of  iron,  bulging  out  and  angular,  in 
which  the  body  was  buried  as  successfully  as  in  the 
robes  of  the  magistrates.  Thus  we  see  the  men  and 
women  of  the  Renaissance  in  the  works  of  all  its 
painters  :  heavy  in  Ghirlandajo,  vulgarly  jaunty  in 
Filippino,  preposterously  starched  and  prim  in  Man- 
tegna,  ludicrously  undignified  in  Signorelli ;  while 
mediaeval  stiffness,  awkwardness,  and  absurdity  reach 
their  acme  perhaps  in  the  little  boys,  companions  of 
the  Medici  children,  introduced  into  Benozzo  Gozzoli's 
Building  of  Babel.  These  are  the  prosperous  towns- 
folk, among  whom  the  Renaissance  artist  is  but  too 
glad  to  seek  for  models  ;  but  besides  these  there  are 
lamentable  sights,  mediaeval  beyond  words,  at  every 


192  EUPHORION. 

street  corner :  dwarfs  and  cripples,  maimed  and 
diseased  beggars  of  all  degrees  of  loathsomeness, 
lepers  and  epileptics,  and  infinite  numbers  of  monks, 
brown,  grey,  and  black,  in  sack-shaped  frocks  and 
pointed  hoods,  with  shaven  crown  and  cropped  beard, 
emaciated  with  penance  or  bloated  with  gluttony. 
And  all  this  the  painter  sees,  daily,  hourly ;  it  is  his 
standard  of  humanity,  and  as  such  finds  its  way  into 
every  picture.  It  is  the  living  ;  but  opposite  it  arises 
the  dead.  Let  us  turn  aside  from  the  crowd  of  the 
mediaeval  city,  and  look  at  what  the  workmen  have 
just  laid  bare,  or  what  the  merchant  has  just  brought 
from  Rome  or  from  Greece.  Look  at  this :  it  is 
corroded  by  oxides,  battered  by  ill-usage,  stained  with 
earth  :  it  is  not  a  group,  not  even  a  whole  statue,  it 
has  neither  head  nor  arms  remaining  ;  it  is  a  mere 
broken  fragment  of  antique  sculpture, — a  naked  body 
with  a  fold  or  two  of  drapery  ;  it  is  not  by  Phidias 
nor  by  Praxiteles,  it  may  not  even  be  Greek  ;  it  may 
be  some  cheap  copy,  made  for  a  garden  or  a  bath,  in 
the  days  of  Hadrian.  But  to  the  artist  of  the  fifteenth 
century  it  is  the  revelation  of  a  whole  world,  a  world 
in  itself.  We  can  scarcely  realize  all  this  ;  but  let  us 
look  and  reflect,  and  even  we  may  feel  as  must  have 
felt  the  man  of  the  Renaissance  in  the  presence  of 
that  mutilated,  stained,  battered  torso.  He  sees  in 
that  broken  stump  a  grandeur  of  outline,  a  magnifi- 
cence of  osseous  structure,  a  breadth  of  muscle  and 
sinew,  a  smooth,  firm   covering  of  flesh,  such  as  he 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  193 

would  vainly  seek  in  any  of  his  living  models  ;  he 
sees  a  delicate  and  infinite  variety  of  indentures,  of 
projections,  of  creases  following  the  bend  of  every 
limb  ;  he  sees,  where  the  surface  still  exists  intact,  an 
elasticity  of  skin,  a  buoyancy  of  hidden  life  such  as  all 
the  colours  of  his  palette  are  unable  to  imitate  ;  and 
in  this  piece  of  drapery,  negligently  gathered  over  the 
hips  or  rolled  upon  the  arm,  he  sees  a  magnificent 
alternation  of  large  folds  and  small  plaits,  of  straight 
lines,  and  broken  lines,  and  curves.  He  sees  all  this  ; 
but  he  sees  more  :  the  broken  torso  is,  as  we  have 
said,  not  merely  a  world  in  itself,  but  the  revelation 
of  a  world.  It  is  the  revelation  of  antique  civilization, 
of  the  palaestra  and  the  stadium,  of  the  sanctification 
of  the  body,  of  the  apotheosis  of  man,  of  the  religion 
of  life  and  nature  and  joy  ;  revealed  to  the  man  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  who  has  hitherto  seen  in  the  untrained, 
diseased,  despised  body  but  a  deformed  piece  of  base- 
ness, which  his  priests  tell  him  belongs  to  the  worms 
and  to  Satan  ;  who  has  been  taught  that  the  monk 
living  in  solitude  and  celibac}-,  filth}',  sick,  worn  out 
with  fastings  and  bleeding  with  flagellation,  is  the 
nearest  approach  to  divinity  ;  who  has  seen  Divinity 
itself,  pale,  emaciated,  joyless,  hanging  bleeding  from 
the  cross  ;  and  who  is  for  ever  reminded  that  the 
kingdom  of  this  Godhead  is  not  of  this  world. 

What  passes  in  the  mind  of  that  artist .'  What 
surprise,  what  dawning  doubts,  what  sickening  fears, 
what  longings  and  what  remorse  are  not  the  fruit  of 

14 


194  EUPHORION. 

this  sight  of  Antiquity  ?  Is  he  to  yield  or  to  resist  ? 
Is  he  to  forget  the  saints  and  Christ,  and  give  himself 
over  to  Satan  and  to  Antiquity  ?  Only  one  man  boldly 
answered,  Yes.  Mantegna  abjured  his  faith,  abjured 
the  Middle  Ages,  abjured  all  that  belonged  to  his 
time  ;  and  in  so  doing  cast  away  from  him  the  living 
art  and  became  the  lover,  the  worshipper  of  shadows. 
And  only  one  man  turned  completely  aside  from  the 
antique  as  from  the  demon,  and  that  man  was  a  saint, 
Fra  Angelico  da  Fiesole.  And  with  the  antique,  Fra 
Angelico  rejected  all  the  other  artistic  influences  and 
aims  of  his  time,  the  time  not  of  Giotto  or  of  Orcagna, 
but  of  Masaccio  and  Uccello,  of  Pollaiolo  and  Donatello. 
For  the  mild,  meek,  angelic  monk  dreaded  the  life  of 
his  days  ;  dreaded  to  leave  the  flower-beds  of  his 
cloister  where  the  sunshine  was  tempered  and  the 
noise  reduced  to  a  mere  faint  hum  ;  dreaded  to  soil 
or  rumple  his  spotless  white  robe  and  his  shining 
black  cowl ;  a  spiritual  sybarite,  shrinking  from 
the  sight  of  the  crowd  seething  in  the  streets, 
shrinking  from  the  idea  of  stripping  the  rags  off 
the  beggar  in  order  to  see  his  tanned  and  gnarled 
limbs ;  shuddering  at  the  thought  of  seeking  for 
muscles  in  the  dead,  cut-open  body ;  fearful  of  every 
■whiff  of  life  that  might  mingle  with  the  incense  atmo- 
sphere of  his  chapel,  of  every  cry  of  human  passion 
which  might  break  through  the  well-ordered  sweetness 
of  his  chants.  No  ;  the  Renaissance  did  not  exist  for 
him  who  lived  in  a  world  of  diaphanous  form,  colour 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  195 

and  character,  unsubstantial  and  unruffled  ;  dreaming 
feebly  of  transparent-cheeked  Madonnas  with  no 
limbs  beneath  their  robes  ;  of  smooth-faced  saints 
with  well-combed  beard  and  vacant,  sweet  gaze, 
seated  in  well-ordered  masses,  holy  with  the  purity 
of  inanity ;  and  of  divine  dolls  with  flaxen  locks, 
floating  between  heaven  and  earth,  playing  upon 
lute  and  viol  and  psaltery  ;  raised  to  faint  visions  of 
angels  and  blessed,  moving  noiseless,  feelingless, 
meaningless,  across  the  flowerets  of  Paradise ;  of 
assemblies  of  saints,  arrayed  in  pure  pink,  and  blue 
and  lilac,  seated  in  the  glory  of  an  atmosphere  of 
liquid  gold.  And  thus  Fra  Anglico  worked  on,  con- 
tent with  the  dearly  purchased  science  of  his  masters, 
placid,  beatic,  effeminate,  in  an  a;sthetical  paradise  of 
his  own,  a  paradise  of  sloth  and  sweetness,  a  paradise 
for  weak  souls,  weak  hearts,  and  weak  eyes  ;  patiently 
■repeating  the  same  fleshless  angels,  the  same  boneless 
-saints,  the  same  bloodless  virgins  ;  happy  in  smooth- 
ing the  unmixed,  unshaded  tints  of  sky,  and  earth,  and 
dresses  ;  laying  on  the  gold  of  the  fretted  heavens, 
and  of  the  iridescent  wings,  embroidering  robes,  in- 
struments of  music,  halos,  flowers,  with  threads  of 
:gold.  .  .  .  Sweet,  simple  artist  saint,  reducing  art  to 
something  akin  to  the  delicate  pearl  and  silk  embroi- 
dery of  pious  nuns,  to  the  exquisite  sweetmeat  cookery 
of  pious  monks  ;  a  something  too  delicately  gorgeous, 
too  deliciously  insipid  for  human  wear  or  human  food  ; 
>no,  the  Renaissance  does  not  exist  for  thee,  either  in 


196  EOPHORION. 

its  study  of  the  existing  reality,  or  in  its  study  of 
antique  beauty. 

Mantegna,  the  learned,  the  archaeological,  the  pagan, 
who  renounces  his  times  and  his  faith ;  and  Angelico, 
the  monk,  the  saint,  who  bolts  his  monastery  doors 
and  sprinkles  holy  water  in  the  face  of  the  antique  ; 
the  two  extremes,  are  both  exceptions.  The  innu- 
merable artists  of  the  Renaissance  remained  in 
hesitation  ;  tried  to  court  both  the  antique  and  the 
modern,  to  unite  the  Pagan  and  the  Christian — some, 
like  Ghirlandajo,  in  cold  indifference  to  all  but  mere 
artistic  science,  encrusting  marble  bacchanals  into  the 
walls  of  the  Virgin's  paternal  house,  bringing  together, 
unthinkingly,  antique-draped  women  carrying  baskets 
and  noble  Strozzi  and  Ruccellai  ladies  with  gloved 
hands  folded  over  their  gold  brocaded  skirts  ;  others, 
with  cheerful  and  childlike  pleasure  in  both  antique 
and  modern,  like  Benozzo,  crowding  together  half- 
naked  youths  and  nymphs  treading  the  grapes  and 
scaling  the  trellise  with  Florenjiine  magnificos  in 
plaited  skirts  and  starched  collars,  among  the  pines 
and  porticos,  the  sprawling  children,  barking  dogs, 
peacocks  sunning  themselves,  and  partridges  picking 
up  grain,  of  his  Pisan  frescoes ;  yet  others  using  the 
antique  as  mere  pageant  shows,  allegorical  mummeries 
destined  to  amuse  some  Duke  of  Ferrara  or  Marquis 
of  Mantua,  together  with  the  hurdle  races  of  Jews, 
hags,  and  riderless  donkeys. 

Thus  little  by  little  the  antique  amalgamates  with 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  197 

the  modern  ;  the  art  born  of  the  Middle  Ages  absorbs 
the  art  born  of  Paganism  ;  but  how  slowly,  and  with 
what  fantastic  and  ludicrous  results  at  first ;  as  when 
the  anatomical  sculptor  Pollaiolo  gives  scenes  of  naked 
Roman  prize-fighters  as  martyrdoms  of  St.  Sebastian  ; 
or  when  the  pious  Perugino  (pious  at  least  with  his 
brush)  dresses  up  his  sleek,  hectic,  beardless  archangels 
as  Roman  warriors,  and  makes  them  stand,  straddling 
beatically  on  thin  little  dapper  legs,  wistfully  gazing 
from  beneath  their  wondrously  ornamented  helmets 
on  the  walls  of  the  Cambio  at  Perugia  ;  when  he 
masquerades  meditative  fathers  of  the  Church  as 
Socrates  and  haggard  anchorites  as  Numa  Pompilius  ; 
most  ludicrous  of  all,  when  he  attires  in  scantiest  of 
clinging  antique  drapery  his  mild  and  pensive  Ma- 
donnas, and,  with  daintily  pointed  toes,  places  them 
to  throne  bashfully  on  allegorical  chariots  as  Venus 
or  Diana. 

Long  is  the  period  of  amalgamation,  and  small  are 
the  results  throughout  that  long  early  Renaissance. 
Mantegna,  Piero  della  Francesca,  Melozzo,  Ghir- 
landajo,  Filippino,  Botticelli,  Verrocchio,  have  none 
of  them  shown  us  the  perfect  fusion  of  the  two  elements 
whose  union  is  to  give  us  Michael  Angelo,  Raphael, 
and  all  the  great  perfect  artists  of  the  early  sixteenth 
century ;  the  two  elements  are  for  ever  ill-combined 
and  hostile  to  each  other ;  the  modern  vulgarizes  the 
antique,  the  antique  paralyzes  the  modern.  And 
meanwhile  the  fifteenth  century,  the  century  of  study. 


198  EUPHORION. 

of  conflict,  and  of  confusion,  is  rapidly  drawing  to  a 
close  ;  eight  or  ten  more  years,  and  it  will  be  gone. 
Is  the  new  century  to  find  the  antique  still  dead  and 
the  modern  still  mediaeval  ? 

The  antique  and  the  modern  had  met  for  the  first 
time  and  as  irreconcilable  enemies  in  the  cloisters  of 
Pisa  ;  and  the  modern  had  triumphed  in  the  great 
mediaeval  fresco  of  the  Triumph  of  Death.  By  a 
strange  coincidence,  by  a  sublime  jest  of  accident,  the 
antique  and  the  modern  were  destined  to  meet  again, 
and  this  time  indissolubly  united,  in  a  painting  repre- 
senting the  Resurrection.  Yes,  Signorelli's  fresco  in 
Orvieto  Cathedral  is  indeed  a  resurrection,  the  resur- 
rection of  human  beauty  after  the  long  death-slumber 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  And  the  artist  would  seem  to 
have  been  dimly  conscious  of  the  great  allegory  he 
was  painting.  Here  and  there  are  strewn  skulls ; 
skeletons  stand  leering  by,  as  if  in  remembrance  of 
the  ghastly  past,  and  as  a  token  of  former  death  ;  but 
magnificent  youths  are  breaking  through  the  crust  of 
the  earth,  emerging,  taking  shape  and  flesh  ;  arising, 
strong  and  proud,  ready  to  go  forth  at  the  bidding  of 
the  Titanic  angels  who  announce  from  on  high  with 
trumpet  blast  and  waving  banners,  that  the  death  of 
the  world  has  come  to  an  end,  and  that  mankind 
has  arisen  once  more  in  the  youth  and  beauty  of 
Antiquity. 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  199 

11. 

Signorelli's  frescoes  at  Orvieto,  at  once  the  latest 
works  of  the  fifteenth  century,  and  the  latest  works 
of  an  old  man  nurtured  in  the  traditions  of  Benozzo 
Gozzoli  and  of  Piero  della  Francesca,  mark  the  begin- 
ning of  the  maturity  of  Italian  art.  From  them 
Michael  Angelo  learns  what  he  could  not  be  taught 
even  by  his  master  Ghirlandajo,  the  grand  and  cold 
realist.  He  learns  ;  and  what  he  has  learned  at 
Orvieto  he  teaches  with  re-doubled  force  in  Rome  ; 
and  the  ceiling  of  the  Sixtine  Chapel,  the  heroic 
nudities,  the  majestic  draperies,  the  reappearance 
in  the  modern  art  of  painting  of  the  spirit  and  hand 
of  Phidias,  give  a  new  impulse  and  hasten  on  per- 
fection. When  the  doors  of  the  chapel  are  at  length 
opened,  Raphael  forgets  Perugino  ;  Fra  Bartolomeo 
forgets  Botticelli ;  Sodoma  forgets  Leonardo  ;  the 
narrower  hesitating  styles  of  the  fifteenth  century  are 
abandoned,  as  the  great  example  is  disseminated 
throughout  Italy ;  and  even  the  tumult  of  angels  in 
glory  which  the  Lombard  Correggio  is  to  paint  in 
far-off  Parma,  and  the  daringly  simple  Bacchus  and 
Ariadne  with  which  Tintoret  will  decorate  the  Ducal 
Palace  more  than  fifty  years  later — all  that  is  great 
and  bold,  all  that  is  a  re-incarnation  of  the  spirit  of 
Antiquity,  all  that  marks  the  culmination  of  Renais- 
sance art,  seems  due  to  the  impulse  of  Michael  Angelo, 
and,  through  him,  to  the  example  of  Signorelli.     From 


200  EUPHORION. 

the  celestial  horseman  and  bounding  avenging  angels 
of  R.aphaers  Heliodorus,  to  the  St.  Sebastian  of 
Sodoma,  with  exquisite  limbs  and  head,  rich  with 
tendril-like  locks,  delicate  against  the  brown  Umbrian 
sunset ;  from  the  Madonna  of  Andrea  del  Sarto  seated, 
with  the  head  and  drapery  of  a  Niobe,  by  the  sack  of 
flour  in  the  Annunziata  cloister,  to  the  voluptuous 
goddess,  with  purple  mantle  half  concealing  her  body 
of  golden  white,  who  leans  against  the  sculptured 
fountain  in  Titian's  Sacred  and  Profane  Love,  with  the 
greenish  blue  sky  and  hazy  light  of  evening  behind 
her ;  from  the  extremest  examples  of  the  most 
extreme  schools  of  Lombardy  and  Venetia,  to  the 
most  intense  examples  of  the  remotest  schools  of 
Tuscany  and  Umbria  ;  throughout  the  art  of  the  early 
sixteenth  century,  of  those  thirty  years  which  were  the 
years  of  perfection,  we  see,  more  or  less  marked,  but 
always  distinct,  the  union  of  the  living  art  born  of  the 
Middle  Ages  with  the  dead  art  left  by  Antiquity,  a 
union  producing  life  and  perfection,  producing  the 
great  art  of  the  Renaissance. 

This  much  is  clear  and  easy  of  definition  ;  but  what 
is  neither  clearly  understood  nor  easily  defined  is 
the  manner  in  which  the  antique  and  the  modern 
did  thus  amalgamate.  It  is  easy  to  speak  of  a 
vague  union  of  spirit,  of  the  antique  idea  having 
permeated  the  modern  ;  but  all  this  explains  but 
little :  art  is  not  a  metaphysical  figment,  and  all  its 
phases  and  revolutions  are  concrete,  and,  so  to  speak, 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A,  201 

physically  explicable  and  definable.  The  union  of 
the  antique  with  the  modern  meant  simply  the  ab- 
sorption by  the  art  of  the  Renaissance  of  elements  of 
civilization  necessary  for  its  perfection,  but  not  existing 
in  the  mediaeval  civilization  of  the  fifteenth  century ; 
of  elements  of  civilization  which  gave  what  the  civili- 
zation of  the  fifteenth  century — which  could  give 
<:olour,  perspective,  grouping,  and  landscape — could 
never  have  afforded  :  the  nude,  drapery,  and  gesture. 

The  naked  human  body,  which  the  Greeks  had 
trained,  studied,  and  idolized,  did  not  exist  in  the 
fifteenth  century  ;  in  its  stead  there  was  only  the  un- 
dressed body,  ill-developed,  untrained,  pinched,  and 
distorted  by  the  garments  only  just  cast  off;  cramped 
and  bent  by  sedentary  occupations,  livid  with  the 
plague-spots  of  the  Middle  Ages,  scarred  with  the  whip- 
marks  of  asceticism.  This  stripped  body,  unseen  and 
unfit  to  be  seen,  unaccustomed  to  the  air  and  to  the 
eyes  of  others,  shivered  and  cowered  for  cold  and  for 
shame.  The  Giottesques  ignored  its  very  existence, 
conceiving  humanity  as  a  bodiless  creature,  with  face 
and  hands  to  express  emotion,  and  just  enough  mal- 
formed legs  and  feet  to  be  either  standing  or  moving  ; 
further,  beneath  the  garments,  there  was  nothing. 
The  realists  of  the  fifteenth  century  tore  off  the  clothes 
and  drew  the  ugly  thing  beneath  ;  and  bought  the 
corpses  from  the  lazar-houses,  and  stole  them  from 
the  gallows  ;  in  order  to  see  how  bone  fitted  into  bone, 
and  muscle  was  stretched  over  muscle.     They  learned 


202  EUPHORION. 

to  perfection  the  anatomy  of  the  human  frame,  but 
they  could  not  learn  its  beauty  ;  they  became  even 
reconciled  to  the  ugliness  they  were  accustomed  to 
see  ;  and,  with  their  minds  full  of  antique  examples, 
Verrocchio,  Donatello,  Pollaiolo,  and  Ghirlandajo,  the 
greatest  anatomists  of  the  fifteenth  century,  imitated 
their  coarse  and  ill-made  living  models  even  while 
imagining  that  they  imitated  antique  marbles. 

So  much  for  the  nude.  Drapery,  as  the  ancients 
understood  it  in  the  delicate  plaits  of  Greek  chiton 
and  chlamys,  in  the  grand  folds  of  Roman  toga,  the 
fifteenth  century  could  not  show  ;  it  knew  only  the 
stiff,  scanty  raiment  of  the  active  classes  ;  the  un- 
shapely masses  of  lined  cloth  of  the  merchants  and 
magistrates ;  the  prudish  and  ostentatious  starched 
dress  of  the  women ;  and  the  lumpish  garbof  the  monks. 

The  artist  of  the  fifteenth  century  knew  drapery 
only  as  an  exotic  ;  an  exotic  with  whose  representation 
the  habit  of  seeing  mediaeval  costume  was  for  ever 
interfering.  On  the  stripped,  unseemly,  indecent  body 
he  places,  with  the  stiffness  of  artificiality,  drapery 
such  as  he  has  never  seen  upon  any  living  creature  ; 
the  result  is  awkwardness  and  rigidity.  And  what 
attitude,  what  gesture,  can  he  expect  from  this  stripped 
and  artificially  draped  model .''  None,  for  the  model 
scarce  knows  how  to  stand  in  so  unaccustomed  a  con- 
dition of  body.  The  artist  must  seek  for  attitude  and 
gesture  among  his  townsfolk,  and  among  them  he  rarely 
finds  any  save  trivial,  awkward,  often  vulgar  movement.. 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  203 

They  have  never  been  taught  how  to  stand  or  to  move 
with  grace  and  dignity ;  and  the  artist  studies  attitude 
and  gesture  in  the  market-place  or  the  bull-baiting 
ground,  where  Ghirlandajo  found  his  jauntily  strutting 
idlers,  and  Verrocchio  his  brutally  staggering  prize- 
fighters. Between  the  constrained  attitudinizing  of 
Byzantine  and  Giottesque  tradition,  and  the  imitation 
of  the  movements  of  clodhoppers  and  ragamuffins, 
the  realist  of  the  fifteenth  century  would  wander  hope- 
lessly without  the  help  of  the  antique.  Without  it 
genius  and  science  are  of  no  avail  ;  the  position  of 
Christ  in  baptism  in  the  paintings  of  Verrocchio  and 
Ghirlandajo  is  servile ;  the  movements  of  the  "Thunder- 
stricken  "  in  Signorelli's  lunettes  is  a  comic  mixture  of 
the  brutish  and  the  melodramatic  ;  the  magnificently 
drawn  youth  at  the  door  of  the  prison  in  Filippino's 
Liberation  of  St.  Peter  is  gradually  going  to  sleep  and 
collapsing  in  a  fashion  which  is  anything  but  noble. 

And  the  same  applies  to  sculptured  figures  or  to 
figures  standing  isolated  like  statues  ;  no  Greek  would 
have  ventured  upon  the  swaggering  position,  with 
legs  apart  and  elbows  out,  of  Donatello's  St.  George, 
or  Perugino's  St.  Michael  ;  and  a  young  Athenian 
who  should  have  assumed  the  attitude  of  Verrocchio's 
David,  with  tripping  legs  and  hand  clapped  on  his 
hip,  would  have  been  made  to  sit  in  a  corner  as  a 
saucy  little  ragamuffin. 

Coarse  nude,  stiff  drapery,  commonplace  attitude,  was 
all  that  the  fifteenth  century  could  offer  to  its  artists  ; 


204  EUPHORION. 

but  Antiquity  could  offer  more  and  very  different 
things :  the  naked  body  developed  by  the  most 
artistic  training,  drapery  the  most  natural  and  refined, 
and  attitude  and  gesture  regulated  by  an  education 
the  most  careful  and  artistic  ;  and  all  these  things 
Antiquity  did  give  to  the  artists  of  the  Renaissance. 
They  did  not  copy  antique  statues  instead  of  living 
naked  men  and  women,  but  they  corrected  the  faults 
of  their  living  models  by  the  example  of  the  statues  ; 
they  did  not  copy  antique  stone  draperies  in  coloured 
pictures,  but  they  arranged  the  robes  on  their  models 
with  the  antique  folds  well  in  their  memory  ;  they  did 
not  give  the  gestures  of  statues  to  living  figures,  but 
they  made  the  living  figures  move  in  accordance  with 
those  principles  of  harmony  which  they  had  found 
exemplified  in  the  statues. 

They  did  not  imitate  the  antique,  they  studied 
it  ;  they  obtained  through  the  fragments  of  antique 
sculpture  a  glimpse  into  the  life  of  antiquity,  and  that 
glimpse  served  to  correct  the  vulgarism  and  distortion 
of  the  mediaeval  life  of  the  fifteenth  century.  In  the 
perfection  of  Italian  painting,  the  union  of  antique 
and  modern  being  consummated,  it  is  perhaps  difficult 
to  disentangle  what  really  is  antique  from  what  is 
modern  ;  but  in  the  earlier  times,  when  the  two  elements 
were  still  separate,  we  can  see  them  opposite  each  other 
and  compare  them  in  the  works  of  the  greatest  artists 
Wherever,  as  a  rule,  in  the  paintings  of  the  early  Re- 
naissance, there  is  realism,  marked  by  the  costume  of 


SYMMETRIA  P  RISC  A.  205: 

the  times,  there  is  ugliness  of  form  and  vulgarity  of 
movement ;  where  there  is  idealism,  marked  by  imita- 
tion of  the  antique,  the  nude,  and  drapery,  there  is 
beauty  and  dignity.  We  need  only  compare  Filip- 
pino's  Scene  before  the  Proconsul  with  his  Raising  of 
the  King's  Son  in  the  Brancacci  Chapel  ;  the  grand 
attitude  and  draperies  of  Ghirlandajo's  Zachariah 
with  the  ungraceful  dress  and  movements  of  the  Floren- 
tine citizens  surrounding  him  ;  Benozzo  Gozzoli's  noble 
naked  figure  of  Noah  with  his  ungainly,  hideously 
dressed  figure  of  Cosimo  de'  Medici  ;  Mantegna's 
exquisite  Judith  with  his  preposterous  Marquis  of 
Mantua  ;  in  short,  all  the  purely  realistic  with  all  the 
purely  idealistic  painting  of  the  fifteenth  century.  We 
may  give  one  last  instance.  In  Signorelli's  Orvieto 
frescoes  there  is  a  figure  of  a  young  man,  with  aquiline 
features,  long  crisp  hair  and  strongly  developed  throat, 
which  reappears  unmistakably  in  all  the  compositions, 
and  in  some  of  them  twice  and  thrice  in  various  posi- 
tions. His  naked  figure  is  grand,  his  attitudes  very 
fine,  his  thrown -back  head  superb,  whether  he  be 
slowly  and  painfully  emerging  from  the  earth,  staggered 
and  gasping  with  his  newly  infused  life,  or  sinking 
oppressed  on  the  ground,  broken  and  crushed  by  the 
sound  of  the  trumpet  of  judgment ;  or  whether  he  be 
moving  forward  with  ineffable  longing  towards  the 
angel  about  to  award  him  the  crown  of  the  blessed  ; 
in  all  these  positions  he  is  heroically  beautiful.  We 
meet  him  again,  unmistakable,  but  how  different,  in  the 


2o6  EUPHORION. 

realistic  group  of  the  "Thunder-stricken  " — the  long, 
lank  youth,  with  spindle-shanks  and  egg-shaped  body, 
bounding  forward,  with  grotesque  strides,  over  the 
uncouth  heap  of  dead  bodies,  ungainly  ma>ses  with 
soles  and  nostrils  uppermost,  lying  in  beast-like 
confusion.  This  youth,  with  something  of  a  harlequin 
in  his  jumps  and  his  ridiculous  thin  legs  and  prepos- 
terous padded  body,  is  evidently  the  model  for  the 
naked  demi-gods  of  the  Resurrection  and  the  Para- 
dise :  he  is  the  handsome  boy  as  the  fifteenth  century 
gave  him  to  Signorelli  ;  opposite,  he  is  the  living 
youth  of  the  fifteenth  century  idealized  by  the  study 
of  ancient  sculpture  ;  just  as  the  "  Thunder-stricken  " 
may  be  some  scene  of  street  massacre  such  as  Signo- 
relli might  have  witnessed  at  Cortona  or  Perugia  ;  while 
the  agonies  of  the  "Hell"  are  the  grouped  and  rythmic 
agonies  taught  by  the  antique  ;  just  as  the  two  arch- 
angels of  the  "  Hell,"  in  their  armour  of  Baglioni's 
heavy  cavalry,  may  represent  the  modern  element, 
and  the  same  archangels,  naked,  with  magnificent  fly- 
ing draperies,  blowing  the  trumpets  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion, may  show  the  antique  element  in  Renaissance  art. 
The  antique  influence  was  not,  indeed,  equally 
strong  throughout  Italy.  It  was  strongest  in  the 
Tuscan  school,  which,  seeking  for  perfection  of  linear 
form,  found  that  perfection  in  the  antique  ;  it  was 
weakest  in  the  Lombard  and  Venetian  schools,  which 
sought  for  what  the  antique  could  not  give,  light  and 
shade  and  colour.    The  antique  was  most  efficacious 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  207 

where  it  was  most  indispensable,  and  it  was  more 
necessary  to  a  Tuscan,  strong  only  with  his  charcoal 
or  pencil,  than  to  Lionardo's  Lombards,  who  could 
make  an  imperfect  figure,  beckoning  mysteriously  from 
out  of  the  gloom,  more  fascinating  than  the  finest 
drawn  Florentine  Madonna,  and  could  surround  an 
insignificant  head  with  the  wondrous  sheen  and 
ripple  of  hair,  as  with  an  aureole  of  poetry  ;  it  was 
also  less  necessary  to  Giorgione  and  Titian,  who 
could  hide  coarse  limbs  beneath  their  draperies  of 
precious  ruby,  and  transfigure,  by  the  liquid  gold  of 
their  palettes,  a  peasant  woman  into  a  goddess.  But 
even  the  Lombards,  even  the  Venetians,  required  the 
antique  influence.  They  could  not  perhaps  have 
obtained  it  direct  like  the  Tuscans  :  the  colourists 
and  masters  of  light  and  shade  might  never  have 
understood  the  blank  lines  and  faint  shadows  of  the 
marble  ;  but  they  received  the  antique  influence,  strong 
but  modified  by  the  medium  through  which  it  had 
passed,  from  Mantegna  ;  and  the  relentless  self-sacri- 
fice to  Antiquity,  the  self-paralyzation  of  the  great 
artist,  was  not  without  its  use :  from  Venetian  Padua, 
Mantegna  influenced  the  Bellini  and  Giorgione ;  from 
Lombard  Mantua,  he  influenced  Leonardo  ;  and  Man- 
tegna's  influence  was  that  of  the  antique. 

What  would  have  been  the  art  of  the  Renaissance 
wMthout  the  antique?  The  speculation  is  vain,  for 
the  antique  had  influenced  it,  had  been  goading  it  on 
ever  since  the  earliest  times  ;  it  had  been  present  at 


2o8  EUPHORION. 

its  birth,  it  had  affected  Giotto  through  Niccolo  Pisano, 
and  Masaccio  through  Ghiberti ;  the  antique  influence 
cannot  be  conceived  as  absent  in  the  history  of  ItaHan 
painting.  So  far,  as  a  study  of  the  impossible,  it 
would  be  useless  to  speculate  respecting  the  fate  of 
Renaissance  art  if  uninfluenced  by  the  antique.  But 
lest  we  forget  that  this  antique  influence  did  exist, 
lest,  grown  ungrateful,  we  refuse  it  its  immense  share 
in  producing  Michael  Angelo,  Raphael,  and  Titian, 
we  may  do  well  to  turn  to  an  art  born  and  bred  like 
Italian  art,  in  the  Middle  Ages  ;  like  it,  full  of  strength 
and  power  of  self-development,  but  which,  unlike 
Italian  art,  was  not  directly  influenced  by  the  antique. 
This  art  is  the  great  German  art  of  the  early  sixteenth 
century ,  the  art  of  Aldegrever,  of  Altdorfer,  of 
Wohlgemuth,  of  Kranach,  of  Albrecht  Diirer  and 
Hans  Holbein,  whom  they  resemble  as  Pinturicchio 
and  Lo  Spagna  resemble  Perugino,  as  Palma  and 
Paris  Bordone  resemble  Titian.  This  is  an  art  born 
in  a  civilization  less  perfect  indeed  than  that  of  Italy, 
narrower,  as  Niirnberg  or  Basle  is  narrower  than 
Florence  ;  but  resembling  it  in  habits,  dress,  religion, 
above  all,  the  main  characteristic  of  being  mediaeval  ; 
and  its  masters,  as  great  as  their  Italian  contem- 
poraries in  all  the  technicalities  of  the  art,  and  in 
absolute  honesty  of  endeavour,  may  show  what  the 
Italian  art  of  the  sixteenth  century  might  have  been 
without  the  antique.     Let  us  therefore  open  a  port- 


SYMMETKfA  PRISCA.  209 

folio  of  those  wonderful  minute  yet  grand  engravings 
of  the  old  Germans.  They  are  for  the  most  part 
Scriptural  scenes  or  allegories,  quite  analogous  to 
those  of  the  Italians,  but  purely  realistic,  conscious 
of  no  world  beyond  that  of  an  Imperial  City  of  the 
year  1520.  Here  we  have  the  whole  turn-out,  male 
and  female,  of  a  German  free-town,  in  the  shape  of 
scenes  from  the  lives  of  the  Virgin  and  saints  ;  here 
are  short  fat  burghers,  with  enormous  blotchy,  bloated 
faces  and  little  eyes  set  in  fat,  their  huge  stomachs 
protruding  from  under  their  jackets  ;  here  are  blear- 
eyed  ladies,  tall,  thin,  wrinkled  though  not  old,  with 
figures  like  hungry  harpies,  stalking  about  in  high 
headgears  and  stiff  gowns,  or  sitting  by  the  side  of 
lean  and  stunted  pages,  singing  (with  dolorous  voice) 
to  lutes  ;  or  promenading  under  trees  with  long- 
shanked,  high-shouldered  gentlemen,  with  vacant 
sickly  face  and  long  scraggy  hair  and  beard,  their 
bony  elbows  sticking  out  under  their  slashed  doublets. 
These  courtly  figures  culminate  in  Durer's  mag- 
nificent plate  of  the  wild  man  of  the  woods  kissing 
the  hideous,  leering  Jezebel  in  her  brocade  and 
jewels.  Even  the  poor  Madonnas,  seated  in  front 
of  village  hovels  or  windmills,  smile  the  smile 
of  starved,  sickly  sempstresses.  It  is  a  stunted, 
poverty-stricken,  plague-sick,  society,  this  mediaeval 
society   of  burghers   and   burghers'   wives  ;    the   air 

15 


2IO  EUPHORION. 

seems  bad  and  heavy,  and  the  h'ght  wanting  physi- 
cally and  morally,  in  these  old  free-towns  ;  there  is 
intellectual  sickness  as  well  as  bodily  in  those  musty 
gabled  houses ;  the  mediaeval  spirit  blights  what 
revival  of  healthiness  may  exist  in  these  common- 
wealths. And  feudalism  is  outside  the  gates.  There 
are  the  brutal,  leering  men-at-arms,  in  slashed,  puffed 
doublets  and  heavy  armour,  face  and  dress  as  un- 
human  as  possible,  standing  grimacing  at  the  blood 
spirting  from  John  the  Baptist's  decapitated  trunk, 
as  in  Kranach's  horrible  print,  while  gaping  spectators 
fill  the  castle-yard  ;  there  are  the  castles  high  on 
rocks  amidst  woods,  with  miserable  villages  below, 
where  the  Prodigal  Son  wallows  among  the  swine, 
and  the  tattered  boors  tumble  about  in  drunkenness, 
or  rest  wearied  on  their  spades.  There  are  the  Middle 
Ages  in  full  force.  But  had  these  Germans  of  the 
days  of  Luther  really  no  thought  beyond  their  own 
times  and  their  own  country  .''  Had  they  really  no 
knowledge  of  the  antique  .''  Not  so  ;  they  had  heard 
from  their  learned  men,  from  Willibald  Pirkheimer 
and  Ulrich  von  Hutten,  that  the  world  had  once  been 
peopled  with  naked  gods  and  goddesses.  Nay,  the 
very  year  perhaps  that  Raphael  handed  to  his  en- 
graver, Marc  Antonio,  his  magnificent  drawing  of  the 
Judgment  of  Paris,  Lukas  Kranach  bethought  him  to 
represent  the  story  of  the  good  Knight  Paris  giving 
the   apple   to   the    Lady   Venus.     There,  on    Mount 


SYMMETRIA  PRISCA.  211 

Ida,  with  a  castellated  rock  in  the  distance,  the 
charger  of  Paris  browses  beneath  some  stunted 
larches ;  the  Trojan  knight's  helmet,  with  its  mon- 
strous beak  and  plume,  lies  on  the  ground  ;  and 
near  it  reclines  Paris  himself,  lazy,  in  complete  armour, 
with  frizzled  fashionable  beard.  To  him,  all  wrinkled 
and  grinning  with  brutal  lust,  comes  another  bearded 
knight,  with  wings  to  his  vizored  helmet.  Sir  Mercury, 
leading  the  three  goddesses,  short,  fat-cheeked  Ger- 
man wenches,  housemaids  stripped  of  their  clothes, 
stupid,  brazen,  indifferent.  And  Paris  is  evidently 
prepared  with  his  choice :  he  awards  the  apple  to  the 
fattest,  for  among  a  half-starved,  plague-stricken  peo- 
ple like  this,  the  fattest  must  needs  be  the  chosen  of 
gods  and  men. 

No,  such  pagan  scenes  are  mere  burlesques,  coarse 
mummeries,  such  as  may  have  amused  Niirnberg  and 
Augsburg  during  Shrovetide,  when  drunken  louts 
figured  as  Bacchus  and  sang  drinking  songs  by  Hans 
Sachs.  There  is  no  reality  in  all  this  ;  there  is  no 
belief  in  pagan  gods.  If  we  would  see  the  haunting 
divinity  of  the  German  Renaissance,  we  shall  find 
him  prying  and  prowling  in  nearly  every  scene  of  real 
life  ;  him,  the  ever  present,  the  king  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  whose  triumph  we  have  seen  on  the  cloister 
wall  at  Pisa,  the  Lord  Death.  His  fleshlessface  peers 
from  behind  a  bush  at  Zatzinger's  stunted,  fever- 
stricken  lady  and  imbecile  gentleman  ;  he  sits  grin- 


212  EUPHORION. 

ning  on  a  tree  in  Urs  Grafs  allegory,  while  the  cynical 
knights,  with  haggard,  sensual  faces,  crack  jokes  with  the 
fat  woman  squatted  below ;  he  puts  his  hand  into  the 
basket  of  Diirer's  tattered  pedlar  ;  he  leers  hideously 
at  the  stirrup  of  Diirer's  armed  and  stalwart  knight. 
He  dances  with  all  mankind  from  the  emperor  to  the 
ploughman  in  Holbein's  plates.  No  gods  of  youth  and 
nature,  no  Hercules,  no  Hermes,  no  Venus,  have  in- 
vaded his  German  territories,  as  they  invaded  even 
his  own  palace,  the  burial-ground  at  Pisa  ;  the  antique 
has  not  perverted  Diirer  and  his  fellows,  as  it  per- 
verted Masaccio  and  Signorelli  and  Mantegna,  from 
the  mediaeval  worship  of  Death. 

The  Italians  had  seen  the  antique  and  had  let  them- 
selves be  seduced  by  it,  despite  their  civilization  and 
their  religion.  Let  us  only  rejoice  thereat.  There 
are  indeed  some,  and  among  them  the  great  English 
critic  who  is  irrefutable  when  he  is  a  poet,  and  irra- 
tional when  he  becomes  a  philosopher  ; — there  are 
some  who  tell  us  that  in  its  union  with  antique  art, 
the  art  of  the  followers  of  Giotto  embraced  death,  and 
rotted  away  ever  after.  There  are  others,  more  mode- 
rate but  less  logical,  who  would  teach  us  that  in  uniting 
with  the  antique,  the  mediaeval  art  of  the  fifteenth 
century  purified  and  sanctified  the  beautiful  but  evil 
child  of  Paganism  ;  that  the  goddess  of  Scopas  and 
the  athlete  of  Polyclete  were  raised  to  a  higher  sphere 
when  Raphael  changed  the  one  into  a  Madonna,  and 
Michael    Angelo   metamorphosed   the   other   into  a 


SVMMETRIA  P RISC  A.  213 

prophet.  But  both  schools  of  criticism  are  in  the  wrong 
Every  civilization  has  its  inherent  evil  ;  Antiquity  had 
its  inherent  evils,  as  the  Middle  Ages  had  theirs  ;  An- 
tiquity may  have  bequeathed  to  the  Renaissance  the 
bad  with  the  good,  as  the  Middle  Ages  had  bequeathed 
to  the  Renaissance  the  good  with  the  bad.  But  the 
art  of  Antiquity  was  not  the  evil,  it  was  the  good  of 
Antiquity  ;  it  was  born  of  its  strength  and  its  purity 
only,  and  it  was  the  incarnation  of  its  noblest  qualities. 
It  could  not  be  purified,  because  it  was  spotless  ;  it 
could  not  be  sanctified,  because  it  was  holy.  It  could 
gain  nothing  from  the  art  of  the  Middle  Ages,  alter- 
nately strong  in  brutal  reality,  and  languid  in  mystic 
inanity  ;  the  men  of  the  Renaissance  could,  if  they 
influenced  it  at  all,  influence  the  antique  only  for  evil ; 
they  belonged  to  an  inferior  artistic  civilization,  and 
if  we  conscientiously  seek  for  the  spiritual  improve- 
ments brought  by  them  into  antique  types,  we  shall  see 
that  they  usually  consist  in  spoiling  their  perfect  pro- 
portions ;  in  making  necks  longer  and  muscles  more 
prominent ;  in  rendering  more  or  less  flaccid,  or  meagre 
or  coarse,  the  grand  and  delicate  forms  of  antique 
art.  And  when  we  have  examined  into  this  purified 
art  of  the  Renaissance,  when  we  have  compared  coolly 
and  equitably,  we  may  perhaps  confess  that,  while 
the  Renaissance  added  immense  wealth  of  beauty  in 
colour,  perspective,  and  grouping,  it  took  away  some- 
thing of  the  perfection  of  simple  lines  and  modest 
light  and  shade  of  the  antique  ;  we  may  admit  to  our- 
selves that  the  grandest  saint  by  Raphael  is  meagre 


214  EUPHORION. 

and  stunted,  and  the  noblest  Virgin  by  Titian  is  over- 
blown and  sensual  by  the  side  of  the  demi-gods  and 
amazons  of  antique  sculpture. 

The  antique  perfected  the  art  of  the  Renaissance, 
it  did  not  corrupt  it.  The  art  of  the  Renaissance  fell 
indeed  into  shameful  degradation  soon  after  the  period 
of  its  triumphant  union  with  the  antique  ;  and 
Raphael's  grand  gods  and  goddesses,  his  exquisite 
Eros  and  radiant  Psyche  of  the  Farnesina,  are  indeed 
succeeded  but  too  soon  by  the  Olympus  of  Giulio 
Romano,  an  Olympus  of  harlots  and  acrobats,  who 
smirk  and  mouth  and  wriggle  and  sprawl  ignobly  on 
the  walls  and  ceilings  of  the  dismantled  palace  which 
crumbles  away  among  the  stunted  willows,  the  stag- 
nant pools,  and  rank  grass  of  the  marshes  of  Mantua. 
But  this  is  no  more  the  fault  of  Antiquity  than  it  is 
the  fault  of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  it  is  the  fault  of  that 
great  principle  of  life  and  of  change  which  makes  all 
things  organic,  be  they  physical  or  intellectual,  ger- 
minate, grow,  attain  maturity,  and  then  fade,  wither, 
and  rot.  The  dead  art  of  Antiquity  could  never  have 
brought  the  art  of  the  Renaissance  to  an  untimely 
end  ;  the  art  of  the  Renaissance  decayed  because  it 
was  mature,  and  died  because  it  had  lived. 


THE    PORTRAIT   ART. 


THE    PORTRAIT   ART 


I. 

Real  and  ideal — these  are  the  handy  terms,  admiring 
or  disapproving,  which  criticism  claps  with  random 
facility  on  to  every  imaginable  school.  This  artist 
or  group  of  artists  goes  in  for  the  real — the  upright, 
noble,  trumpery,  filthy  real  ;  that  other  artist  or  group 
of  artists  seeks  after  the  ideal — the  ideal  which  may 
mean  sublimity  or  platitude.  We  summon  every 
living  artist  to  state  whether  he  is  a  realist  or  an 
idealist  ;  we  classify  all  dead  artists  as  realists  or 
idealists  ;  we  treat  the  matter  as  if  it  were  one  of 
almost  moral  importance.  Now  the  fact  of  the  case 
is  that  the  question  of  realism  and  idealism,  which 
we  calmly  assume  as  already  settled  or  easy  to  settle 
by  our  own  sense  of  right  and  wrong,  is  one  of  the 
tangled  questions  of  art-philosophy  ;  and  one,  more- 
over, which  no  amount  of  theory,  but  only  historic 
fact,  can  ever  set  right.  For,  to  begin  with,  we  find 
realism  and  idealism  coming  before  us  in  different 
ways  and    with  different  meaning    and    importance. 


2i8  EUPHORION. 

All  art  which  is  not  addressing  (as  decrepit  art  is- 
forced  to  doj  faculties  to  which  art  does  not  spontane- 
ously and  properly  appeal — all  art  is  decorative,  orna- 
mental, idealistic   therefore,    since    it    consciously   or 
unconsciously  aims,  not   merely  at  reproducing   the 
already  existing,  but  at  producing  something  which 
shall  repay  the  looking  at  it,  something  which  shall  orna- 
ment, if  not  a  place,  at  least  our  lives  ;  and  such  making 
of  the  ornamental,  of  the  worth  looking  at,  necessarily 
implies  selection  and  arrangement  —  that  is  to  say, 
idealism.     At  the  same  time,  while  art  aims  definitely 
at  being  in  this  sense  decorative,  art  may  very  possibly 
aim  more  immediately  at  merely  reproducing,  without 
selection  or  arrangement,  the  actually  existing  things 
of  the  world ;  and  this  in   order  to  obtain   the  mere 
power  of  representation.     In  short,  art  which  is  ideal- 
istic as  a  master  will  yet  be  realistic  as  a  scholar  :  it 
decorates  when  it  achieves,  it  copies  when  it  studies. 
But  this  is  only  half  the  question.      Certain  whole 
schools   may  be    described    as    idealistic,   others    as 
realistic,  in  tendency  ;  and  this,  not  in  their  study,  but 
in  their  achievement.     One  school  will  obviously  be 
contented  with  forms  the  most  unselected  and  vulgar ; 
others  will  go  but  little  out  of  their  way  in  search  of 
form-superiority  ;  while  yet  others,  and  these  we  must 
emphatically  call  idealistic,  are  squeamish  to  the  last 
degree  in  the  choice  and  adaptation  of  form,  anxious 
to  get  the  very  best,  and  make  the  very  best  of  it. 
Yet,  on   thinking  over  it,  we  shall   find  that  realistic 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  219 

and  idealistic  schools  are  all,  in  their  achievements, 
equally  striving  after  something  which  is  not  the  mere 
reproduction  of  the  already  existing  as  such — striving, 
in  short,  after  decoration.  The  pupil  of  Perugino 
will,  indeed,  wait  patiently  to  begin  his  work  until  he 
can  find  a  model  fit  for  a  god  or  goddess  ;  while  the 
fellow-craftsman  of  Rembrandt  will  be  satisfied  with 
the  first  dirty  old  Jew  or  besotten  barmaid  that  comes 
to  hand.  But  the  realistic  Dutchman  is  not,  therefore, 
any  the  less  smitten  with  beauty,  any  the  less  eager 
to  be  ornamental,  than  the  idealistic  Italian  :  his  man 
and  woman  he  takes  indeed  with  off-hand  indifference, 
but  he  places  them  in  that  of  which  the  Italian  shall 
perhaps  never  have  dreamed,  in  that  on  which  he  has 
expended  all  his  science,  his  skill,  his  fancy,  in  that 
which  he  gives  as  his  addition  to  the  beautiful  things 
of  art — in  atmosphere,  in  light,  which  are  to  the  every- 
day atmosphere  and  light  what  the  patiently  sought 
for,  carefully  perfected  god  or  goddess  model  of 
Raphael  is  to  the  everyday  Jew,  to  the  everyday 
barmaid,  of  Rembrandt. 

The  ideal,  for  the  man  who  is  quite  coarsely  realistic 
in  his  figures,  exists  in  the  air,  light,  colour ;  and  in 
saying  this  I  have,  so  to  speak,  turned  over  the  page 
too  quickly,  forestalled  the  expression  of  what  I  can 
prove  only  later:  the  disconnection  of  such  comparative 
realism  and  idealism  as  this  (the  only  kind  of  realism, 
let  us  remember,  which  can  exist  in  great  art)  with 
any  personal  bias  of  the  artist,  its  intimate  dependence 


220  EUPHORION. 

upon  the  constitution  and  tendency  of  art,  upon  its 
preoccupations  about  form,  or  colour,  or  light,  in  a 
given  country  and  at  a  given  moment.  And  now  I 
should  wish  to  resume  the  more  orderly  treatment 
of  the  subject,  which  will  lead  us  in  time  to  the  second 
half  of  the  question  respecting  realism  and  idealism. 

These  considerations  have  come  to  me  in  connec- 
tion with  the  portrait  art  of  the  Renaissance  ;  and  this 
very  simply.  For  portrait  is  a  curious  bastard  of  art, 
sprung  on  the  one  side  from  a  desire  which  is  not 
artistic,  nay,  if  anything,  opposed  to  the  whole  nature 
and  function  of  art:  the  desire  for  the  mere  likeness  of 
an  individual.  The  union  with  this  interloping  tendency, 
so  foreign  to  the  whole  aristocratic  temper  of  art,  has 
produced  portrait ;  and  by  the  position  of  this  hybrid, 
or  at  least  far  from  regularly  bred  creature ;  by  the 
amount  of  the  real  artistic  quality  of  beauty  which  it 
is  permitted  to  retain  by  the  various  schools  of  art, 
we  can,  even  as  by  the  treatment  of  similar  social 
interlopers  we  can  estimate  the  necessities  and  ten- 
dencies of  various  states  of  society,  judge  what  are 
the  conditions  in  which  the  various  schools  of  art 
struggle  for  the  object  of  their  lives,  which  is  the 
beautiful. 

I  have  said  that  art  is  realistic  in  its  periods  or 
moments  of  study  ;  and  this  is  essentially  the  case 
even  with  the  school  which  in  many  respects  was  the 
most  unmistakably  decorative  and  idealistic  in  inten- 
tion :    the   school   of   Giotto.     The    Giottesques   are 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  221 

more  than  decorative  artists,  they  are  decorators  in 
the  most  Hteral  sense.  Painting  with  them  is  merely- 
one  of  the  several  arts  and  crafts  enslaved  by  mediaeval 
architecture  and  subservient  to  architectural  effects. 
Their  art  is  the  only  one  which  is  really  and  success- 
fully architecturally  decorative;  and  to  appreciate  this 
we  must  contrast  their  fresco-work  with  that  of  the 
fifteenth  century  and  all  subsequent  times.  Masaccio, 
Ghirlandajo,  Signorelli,turn  the  wall  into  a  mere  badly 
made  frame  ;  a  gigantic  piece  of  cardboard  would  do 
as  well,  and  better ;  the  colours  melt  into  one  another, 
the  figures  detach  themselves  at  various  degrees  of 
relief;  those  upon  the  ceiling  and  pendentives  are 
frequently  upside  down  ;  yet  these  figures,  which  are 
so  difficult  to  see,  are  worth  seeing  only  in  themselves, 
and  not  in  relation  to  their  position.  The  masonry 
is  no  longer  covered,  but  carved,  rendered  uneven  with 
the  cavities  and  protrusions  of  perspective.  In  Man- 
tegna's  frescoes  the  wall  becomes  a  slanting  theatre 
scene,  cunningly  perspectived  like  Palladio's  Teatro 
Olimpico  ;  with  Correggio,  wall,  masonry,  everything, 
is  dissolved,  the  side  or  cupola  of  a  church  becomes  a 
rent  in  the  clouds,  streaming  with  light. 

Not  so  with  the  Giottesque  frescoes  :  the  wall,  the 
vault,  the  triumphant  masonry  is  always  present  and 
felt,  beneath  the  straight,  flat  bands  of  uniform  colour ; 
the  symmetrical  compartments,  the  pentacles, triangles, 
and  segments,  and  borders  of  histories,  whose  figures 
never  project,  whose  colours  are  separate  as  those  in 


222  EUPHORION. 

a  mosaic.     The  Giottesque  frescoes,  with  their  tiers 
and  compartments  of  dark  blue,  their  vague  figures 
dressed  in  simple  ultramarines,  greens,  dull  reds,  and 
purples  ;  their  geometrical  borders  and  pearlings  and 
dog-tooths  ;  cover  the  walls,  the  ribbed  and  arched 
ceilings,   the   pointed     raftering    almost     like    some 
beautiful   brown,  blue,   and    tarnished   gold    leather- 
hangings  ;  the  figures,  outlined  in   dark   paint,  have 
almost  the  appearance  of  being  stencilled  on  the  wall. 
Such   is    Giottesque   painting :   an  art   which    is  not 
merely  essentially  decorative,  but  which  is,  moreover, 
what  painting  and  sculpture  remained  throughout  the 
Gothic  period,  subservient  to  the  decorative  effect  of 
another  art  ;  an  art  in  which  all  is  subordinated  to 
architectural    effect,   in    which    form,    colour,    figures, 
houses,  the  most  dramatic  scenes  of  the  most  awful 
of  all    dramas,  everything   is  turned  into  a  kind    of 
colossal  and    sublime  wall-paper ;    and    such   an    art 
as  this  would  lead  us  to  expect  but  little  realism, 
little  deliberate  and  slavish  imitation  of  the  existing. 
Yet  wherever  there  is  life  in  this  Gothic  art  (which 
has  a  horrible  tendency,  piously  unobserved  by  critics, 
to   stagnate  into  blundering   repetition  of  the  same 
thing),  wherever   there  is    progress,  there    is,  in  the 
details    of  that  grandiose,  idealistic  decoration,  real- 
ism of  the  crudest  kind.     Those  Giottesque  workers, 
who  were  not  content  with  a  kind  of  Gothic  Byzan- 
tinism  ;  those  who  really  handed  over  something  vital 
\o   their    successors    of  the    fifteenth  century,  while 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  223 

•repeating  the  old  idealistical  decorations ;  were  study- 
ing with  extraordinary  crudeness  of  realism.  Every- 
thing that  was  not  conventional  ornament  or  type 
was  portrait;  and  portrait  in  which  the  scanty  technical 
means  of  the  artist,  every  meagre  line  and  thin  dab 
of  colour,  every  timid  stroke  of  brush  or  of  pencil,  went 
"towards  the  merciless  delineation  not  merely  of  a  body 
but  of  a  soul.  And  the  greater  the  artist,  the  more 
cruel  the  portrait :  cruellest  in  representation  of  utter 
■spiritual  baseness  in  the  two  greatest  of  these  ideal- 
istic decorators  ;  Giotto,  and  his  latest  disciple,  Fra 
Angelico.  Of  this  I  should  like  to  give  a  couple  of 
-examples. 

In  Giotto's  frescoes  at  Santa  Croce — one  of  the 
most  lovely  pieces  of  mere  architectural  decoration 
conceivable — there  are  around  the  dying  and  the  dead 
St.  Francis  two  groups  of  monks,  which  are  astound- 
ingly  realistic.  The  solemn  ending  of  the  ideally 
■beautiful  life  of  sanctity  which  was  so  fresh  in  the 
memory  of  Giotto's  contemporaries,  is  nothing  beyond 
a  set  of  portraits  of  the  most  absolutely  mediocre 
-creatures,  moral  and  intellectual,  of  creatures  the  most 
utterly  incapable  of  religious  enthusiasm  that  ever 
made  religion  a  livelihood.  They  gather  round  the 
dying  and  the  dead  St.  Francis,  a  noble  figure,  not  at 
all  ecstatic  or  seraphic,  but  pure,  strong,  worn  out 
with  wise  and  righteous  labour,  a  man  of  thought  and 
action,  upon  whose  hands  and  feet  the  stigmata  of 
supernatural    rapture    are   a   mere    absurdity.      The 


224  E  UP  H  ORION. 

monks  are  presumably  his  immediate  disciples,  those 
fervent  and  delicate  poetic  natures  of  whom  we  read 
in  the  "  Fioretti  di  San  Francesco."  To  represent  them 
Giotto  has  painted  the  likeness  of  the  first  half-dozen 
friars  he  may  have  met  in  the  streets  near  Santa 
Croce :  not  caricatures,  nor  ideals,  but  portraits- 
Giotto  has  attempted  neither  to  exalt  nor  to  degrade 
them  into  any  sort  of  bodily  or  spiritual  interesting- 
ness.  They  are  not  low  nor  bestial  nor  extremely 
stupid.  They  are  in  various  degrees  dull,  sly,  routinist, 
prosaic,  pedantic  ;  their  most  noteworthy  characteristic 
is  that  they  are  certainly  the  men  who  are  not  called 
by  God.  They  are  no  scandal  to  the  Church,  but 
no  honour ;  they  are  sloth,  stupidity,  sensualism,  and 
cunning  not  yet  risen  to  the  dignity  of  a  vice.  They 
look  upon  the  dying  and  the  dead  saint  with  indif- 
ference, want  of  understanding,  at  most  a  gape  or  a 
bright  look  of  stupid  miscomprehension  at  the  stig- 
mata :  they  do  not  even  perceive  that  a  saint  is  a 
different  being  from  themselves.  With  these  frescoes 
of  Giotto  I  should  wish  to  compare  Fra  Angelico's 
great  ceremonial  crucifixion  in  the  cloister  chapel  of 
San  Marco  of  Florence  ;  for  it  displays  to  an  extra- 
ordinary degree  that  juxtaposition  of  the  most  con- 
ventionally idealistic,  pious  decorativeness  with  the 
realism  straightforward,  unreflecting,  and  heartless  to 
the  point  of  becoming  perfectly  grotesque.  The  fresco 
is  divided  into  two  scenes :  on  the  one  side  the  cruci- 
fixion, the  mystic  actors  of  the  drama,  on  the  other 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  225 

the  holy  men  admitted  to  its  contemplation.  A  sense 
that  holy  things  ought  to  be  old-fashioned,  a  respect 
for  Byzantine  inanity  which  invariable  haunted  the 
Giottesques  in  their  capacity  of  idealistic  decorators, 
of  men  who  replaced  with  frescoes  the  solemn  lifeless 
splendours  of  mosaic  ;  this  kind  of  artistico-religious 
prudery  has  made  Angelico,  who  was  able  to  fore- 
shorten powerfully  the  brawny  crucified  thieves,  repre- 
sent the  Saviour  dangling  from  the  cross  bleached,bone- 
less,  and  shapeless,  a  thing  that  is  not  dead  because  it 
has  never  been  alive.  The  holy  persons  around  stand 
rigid,  vacant.against  their  blue  nowhere  of  background, 
with  vague  expanses  of  pink  face  looking  neither  one  way 
nor  the  other  ;  mere  modernized  copies  of  the  strange, 
goggle-eyed,  vapid  beings  on  the  old  Italian  mosaics. 
This  is  not  a  representation  of  the  actual  reality  of  the 
crucifixion,  like  Tintoret's  superb  picture  at  S.  Rocco, 
or  Diirer's  print,  or  so  many  others,  which  show  the 
hill,  the  people,  the  hangman,  the  ladders  and  ropes 
and  hammers  and  tweezers  :  it  is  a  sort  of  mystic 
repetition  of  it ;  subjective,  if  I  may  say  so ;  existing 
only  in  the  contemplation  of  the  saints  on  the  opposite 
side,  who  are  spectators  only  in  the  sense  that  a  con- 
templative Christian  may  be  said  to  be  the  mystic 
spectator  of  the  Passion.  The  thing  for  the  painter 
to  represent  is  fervent  contemplation,  ecstatic  realiza- 
tion of  the  past  by  the  force  of  ardent  love  and  belief; 
the  condition  of  mind  of  St.  Francis,  St.  Catherine  of 

Siena,  Madame  Guyon  :  it  is  the  revelation  of  the  great 

16 


226  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

tragedy  of  heaven  to  the  soul  of  the  mystic.  Now, 
how  does  Fra  Angelico  represent  this?  A  row  of 
saints,  founders  of  orders,  kneel  one  behind  the  other, 
and  by  their  side  stand  apostles  and  doctors  of  the 
Church ;  admitting  them  to  the  sight  of  the  super- 
human, with  the  gesture,  the  bland,  indifferent  vacuity 
of  the  Cameriere  Segreto  or  Monsignore  who  intro- 
duces a  troop  of  pilgrims  to  the  Pope  ;  they  are  privi- 
leged persons,  they  respect,  they  keep  up  decorum, 
they  raise  their  eyes  and  compress  their  lips  with  cere- 
monious reverence ;  but.  Lord!  they  have  gone  through 
:it  all  so  often,  they  are  so  familiar  with  it,  they  don't 
look  at  it  any  longer  ;  they  gaze  about  listlessly,  they 
would  yawn  if  they  were  not  too  well  bred  for  that. 
The  others,  meanwhile,  the  sainted  pilgrims,  the  men 
whose  journey  over  the  sharp  stones  and  among  the 
pricking  brambles  of  life's  wilderness  finds  its  final 
reward  in  this  admission  into  the  presence  of  the 
Holiest,  kneel  one  by  one,  with  various  expressions  : 
■one  with  the  stupid  delight  of  a  religious  sightseer  ; 
his  vanity  is  satisfied,  he  will  next  draw  a  rosary  from 
his  pocket  and  get  it  blessed  by  Christ  Himself;  he 
will  recount  it  all  to  his  friends  at  home.  Another  is 
dull  and  gaping,  a  clown  who  has  walked  barefoot 
from  Valencia  to  Rome,  and  got  imbecile  by  the  way  ; 
yet  another,  prim  and  dapper  ;  the  rest  indifferent, 
looking  restlessly  about  them,  at  each  other,  at  their 
feet  and  hands,  perhaps  exchanging  mute  remarks 
about  the  length  of  time  they  are  kept  waiting  ;  those 


THE  FOR TRA IT  ART.  227 

at  the  end  of  the  kneeling  procession,  St.  Peter  Martyr 
and  St.  Giovanni  Gualberto  especially,  have  the  bored, 
listless,  devout  look  of  the  priestlets  in  the  train  of  a 
bishop.  All  these  figures,  the  standing  ones  who 
introduce  and  the  kneeling  ones  who  are  being  intro- 
duced, are  the  most  perfect  types  of  various  states  of 
dull,  commonplace,  mediocre  routinist  superstition  ; 
so  many  Camerlenghi  on  the  one  hand,  so  many 
Passionists  or  Propagandists  on  the  other  :  the  first 
aristocratic,  bland  and  bored  ;  the  second,  dull,  list- 
less, mumbling,  chewing  Latin  Prayers  which  never 
meant  much  to  their  minds,  and  now  mean  nothing  ; 
both  perfectly  reverential  and  proper  in  behaviour, 
with  no  more  possibility  of  individual  fervour  of  belief 
than  of  individual  levity  of  disbelief:  the  Church,  as 
it  exists  in  well-regulated  decrepitude.  And  thus 
does  the  last  of  the  Giottesques,  the  painter  of  glorified 
Madonnas  and  dancing  angels,  the  saint,  represent 
the  saints  admitted  to  behold  the  supreme  tragedy  of 
the  Redemption. 

Thus  much  for  the  Giottesques.  The  Tuscans  of 
the  early  Renaissance  developed  up  to  the  utmost, 
assisted  by  the  goldsmiths  and  sculptors,  who  taught 
them  modelling  and  anatomy,  that  realistic  element 
of  Giottesque  painting.  Its  ideal  decorative  part  had 
become  impossible.  Painting  could  no  longer  be  a 
decoration  of  architecture,  and  it  had  not  yet  the  means 
of  being  ornamental  in  itself ;  it  was  an  art  which  did 
not  achieve,  but  merely  studied.     Among  its  exercises 


228  EUPHORION. 

in  anatomy,  modelling,  perspective, and  so  forth,  always 
laborious  and  frequently  abortive,  its  only  spontaneous, 
satisfactory,  mature  production  was  its  portrait  work. 
Portraits  of  burghers  in  black  robes  and  hoods  ;  of 
square-jawed  youths  with  red  caps  stuck  on  to  their 
fuzzy  heads,  of  bald  and  wrinkled  scholars  and  raag- 
nificoes  ;  of  thinly  bearded  artizans  ;  people  who  stand 
round  the  preaching  Baptist  or  crucified  Saviour,  look 
on  at  miracle  or  martyrdom,  stolid,  self-complacent, 
heedless,  against  their  background  of  towered,  walled, 
and  cypressed  city — of  buttressed  square  and  street ; 
ugly  but  real,  interesting,  powerful  among  the  grotesque 
agglomerations  of  bag-of-bones  nudities,  bunched  and 
taped-up  draperies  and  out-of-joint  architecture  of  the 
early  Renaissance  frescoes  ;  at  best  among  its  picture- 
book  and  Noah's-ark  prettinesses  of  toy-box  cypresses, 
vine  trellises,  inlaid  house  fronts,  rabbits  in  the  grass, 
and  peacocks  on  the  roofs  ;  for  the  early  Renaissance, 
with  the  one  exception  of  Masaccio,  is  in  reality  a 
childish  time  of  art,  giving  us  the  horrors  of  school- 
hour  blunders  and  abortions  varied  with  the  delights  of 
nursery  wonderland  :  maturity,  the  power  of  achieving, 
the  perception  of  something  worthy  of  perception, 
comes  only  with  the  later  generation,  the  one  imme- 
diately preceding  the  age  of  Raphael  and  Michael 
Angelo  ;  with  Ghirlandajo,  Signorelli,  Filippino,  Botti- 
celli, Perugino,  and  their  contemporaries. 

But  this  period  is  not  childish,  is  not  immature  in 
everything.     Or,  rather,  the  various  arts  which  exist 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART,  229 

together  at  this  period  are  not  all  in  the  same  stage 
of  development.  While  painting  is  in  this  immature 
jjgliness,  and  ideal  sculpture,  in  works  like  Verrocchio's 
*  and  Donatello's  David,  only  a  cleverer,  more  expe- 
rienced, but  less  legitimate  kind  of  painting,  painting 
more  successful  in  the  present,  but  with  no  possible 
future  ;  the  almost  separate  art  of  portrait-sculpture 
arises  again  where  it  was  left  by  Graeco-Roman 
masters,  and,  developing  to  yet  greater  perfection, 
gives  in  marble  the  equivalent  of  what  painting  will 
be  able  to  produce  only  much  later :  realistic  art 
which  is  decorative  ;  beautiful  works  made  out  of  ugly 
materials. 

The  vicissitudes  of  Renaissance  sculpture  are 
strange  :  its  life,  its  power,  depend  upon  death ;  it  is  an 
art  developed  in  the  burying  vault  and  cloister  ceme- 
tery. During  the  Middle  Ages  sculpture  had  had  its 
reason,  its  vital  possibility,  its  something  to  influence, 
nay,  to  keep  it  alive,  in  architecture  ;  but  with  the  dis- 
appearance of  Gothic  building  disappears  also  the 
possibility  of  the  sculpture  which  covers  the  portals  of 
Chartres  and  the  belfry  of  Florence.  The  pseudo- 
classic  colonnades,  entablatures,  all  the  thin  bastard 
Ionic  and  Corinthian  of  Alberti  and  Bramante,  did  not 
require  sculpture,  or  had  their  own  little  supply  of  un- 
fleshed ox-skulls,  greengrocer's  garlands,  scallopings 
and  wave-linings,  which,  with  a  stray  siren  and  one 
or  two  bloated  emperors'  heads,  amply  sufficed.  On 
the  other  hand,  mediaeval  civilization  and    Christian 


230  EUPHORION. 

dogma  did  not  encourage  the  production  of  naked  or 
draped  ideal  statues  like  those  which  Antiquity  stuck 
on  countless  temple  fronts,  and  erected  at  every 
corner  of  square,  street,  or  garden.  The  people  of  the 
Middle  Ages  were  too  grievously  ill  grown,  distorted, 
hideous,  to  be  otherwise  than  indecent  in  nudity  ;  they 
may  have  had  an  instinct  of  the  kind,  and,  ugly  as 
they  knew  themselves  to  be,  they  must  yet  have  found 
in  forms  like  those  of  Verrocchio's  David  insufficient 
beauty  to  give  much  pleasure.  Besides,  if  the  Middle 
Ages  had  left  no  moral  room  for  ideal  sculpture  once 
freed  from  the  service  of  architecture,  they  had  still 
less  provided  it  with  a  physical  place.  Such  things 
could  not  be  set  up  in  churches,  and  only  a  very 
moderate  number  of  statues  could  be  wanted  as  open- 
air  monuments  in  the  narrow  space  of  a  still  Gothic 
city  ;  and,  in  fact,  ideal  heroic  statues  of  the  early 
Renaissance  are  fortunately  not  only  ugly,  but  com- 
paratively few  in  number.  There  remained,  therefore^ 
for  sculpture,  unless  contented  to  dwindle  down  into 
brass  and  gold  miniature  work,  no  regular  employ- 
ment save  that  connected  with  sepulchral  monuments. 
During  the  real  Middle  Ages,  and  in  the  still  Gothic 
north,  the  ornamentation  of  a  tomb  belonged  to  archi- 
tecture :  from  the  superb  miniature  minsters,  pillared 
and  pinnacled  and  sculptured,  cathedrals  within  the 
cathedral,  to  the  humbler  foliated  arched  canopy,  pro- 
tecting a  simple  sarcophagus  at  the  corner  of  many  a 
street  in  Lombardy.  The  sculptor's  work  was  but  the  low 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  23 r 

relief  on  the  church  flags,  the  timidly  carved,  outlined, 
cross-legged  knight  or  praying  priest,  flattened  down 
on  his  pillow  as  if  ashamed  even  of  that  amount  of 
prominence,  and  in  a  hurry  to  be  trodden  down  and 
obliterated  into  a  few  ghostly  outlines.  But  to  this 
humiliated  prostrate  image,  to  this  flat  thing  doomed 
to  obliteration,  came  the  sculptor  of  the  Renaissance^ 
and  bade  the  wafer-like  simulacrum  fill  up,  expand, 
raise  itself,  lift  itself  on  its  elbow,  arise  and  take 
possession  of  the  bed  of  state,  the  catafalque  raised 
high  above  the  crowd,  draped  with  brocade,  carved 
with  rich  devices  of  leaves  and  beasts  of  heraldry^ 
roofed  over  with  a  dais,  which  is  almost  a  triumphal 
arch,  garlanded  with  fruits  and  flowers,  upon  which 
the  illustrious  dead  were  shown  to  the  people  ;  but 
made  eternal,  and  of  eternal  magnificence,  by  the 
stone-cutter,  and  guarded,  not  for  an  hour  by  the 
liveried  pages  or  chaunting  monks,  but  by  winged 
genii  for  all  eternity.  Some  people,  I  know,  call  this 
a  degradation,  and  say  that  it  was  the  result  of  corrupt 
pride,  this  refusal  to  have  the  dear  or  illustrious  dead 
scraped  out  any  longer  by  the  shoe-nails  of  every 
ruffian,  rubbed  out  by  the  knees  of  every  kitchen 
wench  ;  but  to  me  it  seems  that  it  was  due  merely  to 
the  fact  that  sculpture  had  lost  its  former  employment, 
and  that  a  great  art  cannot  (thank  Heaven  ! )  be 
pietistically  self-humiliating.  Be  this  as  it  may,  the 
sculpture  of  the  Renaissance  had  found  a  new  and 
singularly  noble  line  of  work,  the  one  in  which  it  was. 


232  EUPHORION. 

great,  unique,  unsurpassed,  because  untutored.  It 
worked  here  without  models,  to  suit  modern  require- 
ments, with  modern  spirit ;  it  was  emphatically 
modern  sculpture  ;  the  only  modern  sculpture  which 
can  be  talked  of  as  something  original,  genuine,  valu- 
able, by  the  side  of  antique  sculpture.  Greek  Antiquity 
had  evaded  death,  and  neglected  the  dead  ;  a  garland 
of  maenads  and  fauns  among  ivy  leaves,  a  battle  of 
amazons  or  centaurs  ;  in  the  late  semi-Christian, 
platonic  days,  some  Orphic  emblem,  or  genius  ;  at 
most,  as  in  the  exquisite  tombs  of  the  Keramikos  of 
Athens,  a  figure,  a  youth  on  a  prancing  steed,  like  the 
Phidian  monument  of  Dexileus  ;  a  maiden,  draped 
and  bearing  an  urn  ;  but  neither  the  youth  nor  the 
maiden  is  the  inmate  of  the  tomb  :  they  are  types, 
living  types,  no  portraits.  Nay,  even  where  Antiquity 
shows  us  Death  or  Hermes,  gently  leading  away  the 
beloved  ;  the  spirit,  the  ghost,  the  dead  one,  is  unin- 
dividual.  "  Sarkophagen  und  Urnen  bekranzte  der 
Heide  mit  Leben,"  said  Goethe  ;  but  it  was  the  life 
which  was  everlasting  because  it  was  typical :  the  life 
not  which  had  been  relinquished  by  the  one  buried 
there,  but  the  life  which  the  world  danced  on,  forget- 
ful, round  his  ashes.  The  Romans,  on  the  contrary, 
graver  and  more  retentive  folk  than  the  Greeks,  as 
well  as  more  domestic,  less  coffee-house  living,  appear 
to  have  inherited  from  the  Etruscans  a  desire  to  pre- 
serve the  effigy  of  the  dead,  a  desire  unknown  to  the 
Greeks.     But  the  Etrusco-Roman  monuments,  where 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  233 

husband  and  wife  stare  forth  togaed  and  stolaed,  half 
reduced  to  a  conventional  crop-headedness,  grim  and 
stiff  as  if  sitting  unwillingly  for  their  portrait ;  or 
reclining  on  the  sarcophagus-lid,  neither  dead,  nor 
asleep,  nor  yet  alive  and  awake,  but  with  a  hieratic 
mummy  stare,  have  little  of  aesthetic  or  sympathetic 
value.  The  early  Renaissance,  then,  first  bethought 
it  of  representing  the  real  individual  in  the  real  death 
slumber.  And  I  question  whether  anything  more 
fitting  could  be  placed  on  a  tomb  than  the  effigy  of  the 
dead  as  we  saw  them  just  before  the  coffin-lid  closed 
down  ;  as  we  would  give  our  all  to  see  them  but  one 
little  moment  longer;  as  they  continue  to  exist  for  our 
fancy  within  the  grave;  for  to  any  but  morbid  feelings 
the  beloved  can  never  suffer  decay.  Whereas  a  por- 
trait of  the  man  in  life,  as  the  throning  popes  in  St. 
Peter's,  seems  heartless  and  derisive ;  such  monuments 
striking  us  as  conceived  and  ordered  by  their  inmates 
while  alive,  like  Michael  Angelo's  Pope  Julius,  and 
Browning's  Bishop,  who  was  so  preoccupied  about  his 
tomb  in  St.  Praxed's  Church.  The  Renaissance,  the 
late  Middle  Ages,  felt  better  than  this :  on  the 
extreme  pinnacle,  high  on  the  roof,  they  might  indeed 
place  against  the  russet  brick  or  the  blue  sky,  amid 
the  hum  of  life  and  the  movement  of  the  air,  the 
living  man,  like  the  Scaligers,  the  mailed  knight  on 
his  charger,  lance  in  rest ;  but  in  the  church  below, 
under  the  funereal  pall,  they  could  place  only  the  body 
such  as  it  may  have  lain  on  the  bier. 


234  E  UP  n  ORION. 

And  that  figure  on  the  bier  was  the  great  work  of 
Renaissance  sculpture.  Inanimate  and  vulgar  when 
in  heroic  figures  they  tried  to  emulate  the  ancients, 
the  sculptors  of  the  fifteenth  century  have  found  their 
own  line.  The  modesty,  the  simplicity,  the  awful  and 
beautiful  repose  of  the  dead  ;  the  individual  character 
cleared  of  all  its  conflicting  meannesses  by  death, 
simplified,  idealized  as  it  is  in  the  memory  of  the 
survivors — all  these  are  things  which  belong  to  the 
Renaissance.  As  the  Greeks  gave  the  strong,  smooth 
life-current  circulating  through  their  heroes  ;  so  did 
these  men  of  the  fifteenth  century  give  the  gentle  and 
harmonious  ebbing  after-life  of  death  in  their  sepulchral 
monuments.  Things  difficult  to  describe,  and  which 
must  be  seen  and  remembered.  There  is  the  monu- 
ment, now  in  the  museum  at  Ravenna,  by  a  sculptor 
whose  name,  were  it  known,  would  surely  be  among 
the  greatest,  of  the  condottiere,  Braccioforte  :  the  body 
prone  in  its  heavy  case  of  armour,  not  yet  laid  out  in 
state,  but  such  as  he  may  have  been  found  in  the 
evening,  when  the  battle  was  over,  under  a  tree  where 
they  had  carried  him  to  die  while  they  themselves 
went  back  to  fight ;  the  head  has  fallen  back,  side- 
ways, weighed  down  by  the  helmet,  which  has  not 
even  been  unbuckled,  only  the  face,  the  clear-cut, 
austere  features,  visible  beneath  the  withdrawn  vizor ; 
the  eyes  have  not  been  closed  ;  and  there  are  ievf 
things  more  exquisite  and  solemn  at  once  in  all 
sculpture,  than  the  indication  of  those  no  longer  seeing 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  23c 

eyes,  of  that  broken  glance,  beneath  the  half-closed 
lids.  There  is  Rossellino's  Cardinal  of  Portugal  at 
S.  Miniato  a  Monte :  the  slight  body,  draped  in  epis- 
copal robes,  lying  with  delicate  folded  hands,  in 
gracious  decorum  of  youthful  sanctity ;  the  strong 
delicate  head,  of  clear  feature  and  gentle  furrow  of 
suffering  and  thought,  a  face  of  infinite  purity  of 
strength,  strength  still  ungnarled  by  action  :  a  young 
priest,  who  in  his  virginal  dignity  is  almost  a  noble 
woman.  And  there  is  the  Ilaria  Guinigi  of  Jacopo 
della  Querela  (the  man  who  had  most  natural  affinity 
with  the  antique  of  all  these  sculptors,  as  one  may  see 
from  the  shattered  remains  of  the  Fonte  Gaia  of 
Siena),  the  lady  stretched  out  on  the  rose-garlanded 
bed  of  state  in  a  corner  of  Lucca  Cathedral,  her  feet 
upon  her  sleeping  dog,  her  sweet,  girlish  head,  with 
wavy  plaits  of  hair  encircled  by  a  rose-wreathed, 
turban-like  diadem,  lying  low  on  round  cushions  ;  the 
bed  gently  giving  way  beneath  the  beautiful,  ample- 
bosomed  body,  round  which  the  soft  robe  is  chastely 
gathered,  and  across  which  the  long-sleeved  arms 
are  demurely  folded  ;  the  most  beautiful  lady  (whose 
majestic  tread  through  the  palace  rooms  we  can  well 
imagine)  that  the  art  of  the  fifteenth  century  has  re- 
corded. There  is,  above  all,  the  Carlo  Marsuppini  of 
Desiderio  da  Settignano,  the  humanist  Secretary  ot 
the  Commonwealth,  lying  on  the  sarcophagus,  superb 
with  shell  fretwork  and  curling  acanthus,  in  Santa 
Croce  of  Florence.     For  the  youthful  beauty  of  the 


236  EUPHORION. 

Cardinal  of  Portugal  and  of  the  Lady  Ilaria  are 
commonplace  compared  with  the  refinement  of  this 
worn  old  face,  with  scant  wavy  hair  and  thin,  gently 
furrowed,  but  by  no  means  ploughed-up  features. 
The  slight  figure  looks  as  if  in  life  it  must  have 
seemed  almost  transparent  ;  and  the  hands  are  very 
pathetic  :  noble,  firm  hands,  subtle  of  vein  and  wrist, 
crossed  simply,  neither  in  prayer  nor  in  agony,  but  in 
gentle  weariness,  over  the  book  on  his  breast.  That 
book  is  certainly  no  prayer-book  ;  rather  a  volume  of 
Plato  or  Cicero  :  in  his  last  moments  the  noble  old 
man  has  longed  for  a  glance  over  the  familiar  pages  ; 
they  have  placed  the  book  on  his  breast,  but  it  has 
been  too  late  ;  the  drowsiness  of  death  has  overtaken 
him,  and  with  his  last  sigh  he  has  gently  folded  his 
hands  over  the  volume,  with  the  faint,  last  clinging  to 
the  things  beloved  in  this  world. 

Such  is  that  portrait  sculpture  of  the  early  Renais- 
sance, its  only  sculpture,  if  we  except  the  exquisite  work 
in  babies  and  angels  just  out  of  the  nursery  of  the  Rob- 
bias,  which  is  a  real  achievement.  But  how  achieved  ? 
This  art  is  great  just  by  the  things  which  Antiquity 
did  not.  And  what  are  those  things  ?  Shall  we  say 
that  it  is  sentiment }  But  all  fine  art  has  tact,  antique 
art  most  certainly  ;  and  as  to  pathos,  why,  any  quiet 
figure  of  a  dead  man  or  woman,  however  rudely  carved, 
has  pathos  ;  nay,  there  is  pathos  in  the  poor  puling, 
hysterical  art  which  makes  angels  draw  the  curtains 
of  fine  ladies'  bedchambers,  and  fine  ladies,  in  hoop  or 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  237 

limp  Grecian  dress,  faint  (the  smelling  bottle,  Betty  \) 
over  their  lord's  coffin  ;  there  is  pathos,  to  a  decently 
constituted  human  being,  wherever  (despite  all  ab- 
surdities) we  can  imagine  that  there  lies  some  one 
whom  it  was  bitter  to  see  departing,  to  whom  it  was 
bitter  to  depart.  Pathos,  therefore,  is  not  the  question  ; 
and,  if  you  choose  to  call  it  sentiment,  it  is  in  reality 
a  sentiment  for  line  and  curve,  for  stone  and  light. 
The  great  question  is.  How  did  these  men  of  the 
Renaissance  make  their  dead  people  look  beautiful  } 
For  they  were  not  all  beautiful  in  life,  and  ugly  folk 
do  not  grow  beautiful  merely  because  they  are  dead. 
The  Cardinal  of  Portugal,  the  beautiful  Ilaria  herself, 
were  you  to  sketch  their  profile  and  place  it  by  the 
side  of  no  matter  what  ordinary  antique,  would  greatly 
fall  short  of  what  we  call  sculpturesque  beauty  ;  and 
many  of  the  others,  old  humanists  and  priests  and 
lawyers,  are  emphatically  ugly :  snub  or  absurdly 
hooked  noses,  retreating  or  deformedly  overhanging 
foreheads,  fleshy  noses,  and  flabby  cheeks,  blear  eyes 
and  sunk-in  mouths  ;  and  a  perfect  network  of  wrinkles 
and  creases,  which,  hard  as  it  is  to  say,  have  been 
scooped  out  not  merely  by  age,  but  by  low  mind, 
fretting  and  triumphant  animalism.  Now,  by  what 
means  did  the  sculptor  —  the  sculptor,  too  unac- 
quainted with  sculptural  beauty  (witness  his  ugly 
ideal  statues),  to  be  able,  like  the  man  who  turned  the 
successors  of  Alexander  into  a  race  of  leonine  though 
crazy  demi-gods — to  insidiously  idealize  these  ugly  and 


^38  EUPHORION. 

insignificant  features  ;  by  what  means  did  he  turn 
these  dead  men  into  things  beautiful  to  see  ?  I  have 
said  that  he  took  up  art  where Graeco-Roman  Antiquity 
had  left  it.  Remark  that  I  say  Graeco-Roman,  and  I 
ought  to  add  much  more  Roman  than  Greek.  For 
Greek  sculpture,  nurtured  in  the  habit  of  perfect  form, 
art  to  which  beauty  was  a  cheap  necessity,  invariably 
idealized  portrait,  idealized  it  into  beauty  or  inanity. 
But  when  Greek  art  had  run  its  course  ;  when  beauty 
of  form  had  well-nigh  been  exhausted  or  begun  to 
-pall ;  certain  artists,  presumably  Greeks,  but  working 
for  Romans,  began  to  produce  portrait  work  of  quite 
a  new  and  wonderful  sort  :  the  beautiful  portraits  of 
ugly  old  men,  of  snub  little  boys,  work  which  was 
clearly  before  its  right  time,  and  was  swamped  by 
idealized  portraits,  insipid,  nay,  inane,  from  the  elegant 
revivalist  busts  of  Hadrian  and  Marcus  Aureliusdown 
to  the  bonnet  blocks  of  the  lower  empire.  Of  this 
Roman  portrait  art,  of  certain  heads  of  half-idiotic 
little  Caesar  brats,  of  sly  and  wrinkled  old  men,  things 
which  ought  to  be  so  ugly  and  yet  are  so  beautiful, 
we  say,  at  least,  perhaps  unformulated,  we  think, 
•"  How  Renaissance  ! "  And  the  secret  of  the  beauty 
of  these  few  Graeco-Roman  busts,  which  is  also  that 
of  Renaissance  portrait  sculpture,  is  that  the  beauty  is 
quite  different  in  kind  from  the  beauty  of  Greek  ideal 
sculpture,  and  obtained  by  quite  different  means. 

It  is,  essentially,  that  kind  of  beauty  which  I  began 
iby  saying  belonged  to  realistic  art,  to  the  art  which  is 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  239 

not  squeamish  about  the  object  which  it  represents, 
but  is  squeamish  about  the  manner  and  medium  in 
which  that  indifferent  object  is  represented ;  it  is  a  kind 
of  beauty,  therefore,  more  akin  to  that  of  Rembrandt 
and  Velasquez  than  to  that  of  Michael  Angelo  or 
Raphael.  It  is  the  beauty,  not  of  large  lines  and 
harmonies,  beauty  residing  in  the  real  model's  forms, 
beauty  real,  wholesale,  which  would  be  the  same  if 
the  man  were  not  marble  but  flesh,  not  in  a  given 
position  but  moving ;  but  it  is  a  beauty  of  combina- 
tions of  light  and  surface,  a  beauty  of  texture  opposed 
to  texture,  which  would  probably  be  unperceived  in 
the  presence  of  the  more  regal  beauty  of  line  and 
colour  harmonies,  and  which  those  who  could  obtain 
this  latter  would  employ  only  as  much  as  they  were 
conducive  to  such  larger  beauties.  And  this  beauty 
of  texture  opposed  to  texture  and  light  combined  with 
surface  is  a  very  real  thing  ;  it  is  the  great  reality  of 
Renaissance  sculpture  :  this  beauty,  resulting  from 
the  combination,  for  instance,  in  a  commonplace  face, 
of  the  roughness  and  coarser  pore  of  the  close  shaven 
lips  and  chin  with  the  smoothness  of  the  waxy 
hanging  cheeks  ;  the  one  catching  the  light,  the  other 
breaking  it  into  a  ribbed  and  forked  penumbra.  The 
very  perfection  of  this  kind  of  work  is  Benedetto  da 
Maiano's  bust  of  Pietro  Mellini  in  the  Bargello  at 
Florence.  The  elderly  head  is  of  strongly  marked 
osseous  structure,  yet  fleshed  with  abundant  and  flaccid 
flesh,  hanging  in  folds  or  creases  round  the  mouth  and 


240  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

chin,  yet  not  flobbery  and  floppy,  but  solid,  thoug^h 
yielding,  creased,  wrinkled,  crevassed  rather  as  a  sandy 
hillside  is  crevassed  by  the  trickling  waters  ;  semi- 
solid, promising  slight  resistance,  waxy,  yielding 
to  the  touch.  But  all  the  flesh  has,  as  it  were,  gravi- 
tated to  the  lower  part  of  the  face,  conglomerated, 
or  rather  draped  itself,  about  the  mouth,  firmer  for 
sunken  teeth  and  shaving ;  and  the  skin  has  remained 
alone  across  the  head,  wrinkled,  yet  drawn  in  tight 
folds  across  the  dome-shaped  skull,  as  if,  while  the 
flesh  disappeared,  the  bone  also  had  enlarged.  And 
on  the  temples  the  flesh  has  once  been  thick,  the  bone 
(seemingly)  slight  ;  and  now  the  skin  is  being  drawn, 
recently,  and  we  feel  more  and  more  every  day,  into  a 
radiation  of  minute  creases,  as  if  the  bone  and  flesh 
were  having  a  last  struggle.  Now  in  this  head  there 
is  little  beauty  of  line  (the  man  has  never  been  good- 
looking),  and  there  is  not  much  character  in  the  sense 
of  strongly  marked  mental  or  moral  personality.  I 
do  not  know,  nor  care,  what  manner  of  man  this  may 
have  been.  The  individuality  is  one,  not  of  the  mind^ 
but  of  the  flesh.  What  interests,  attaches,  is  not  the 
character  or  temperament,  but  the  bone  and  skin,  the 
creases  and  folds  of  flesh.  And  herein  also  lies  the 
beauty  of  the  work.  I  do  not  mean  its  interest  or 
mere  technical  skill,  I  mean  distinctly  visible  and 
artistic  beauty. 

Thus   does  the   sculptor   of  the    Renaissance   get 
beauty,  visible  beauty,  not  psychologic  interest,  out  ot 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  241 

a  plain  human  being  ;  but  the  beauty  (and  this  is  the 
distinguishing  point  of  what  I  must  call  realistic 
decorative  art)  does  not  exist  necessarily  in  the  plain 
human  being :  he  merely  affords  the  beginning  of  a 
pattern  which  the  artist  may  be  able  to  carry  out.  A 
person  may  have  in  him  the  making  of  a  really  beau- 
tiful bust  and  yet  be  ugly ;  just  as  the  same  person  may 
afford  a  subject  for  a  splendid  painting  and  for  an 
execrable  piece  of  sculpture.  The  wrinkles  and  creases 
in  a  face  like  that  of  Benedetto  da  Maiano's  Mellini 
would  probably  be  ugly  and  perhaps  disgusting  in  the 
real  reddish,  flaccid,  discoloured  flesh  ;  while  they  are 
admirable  in  the  solid  and  supple-looking  marble,  in 
its  warm  and  delicate  bistre  and  yellow.  Material  has 
an  extraordinary  effect  upon  form  ;  colour,  though 
not  a  positive  element  in  sculpture,  has  immense 
negative  power  in  accentuating  or  obliterating  the 
mere  lin«.  All  form  becomes  vague  and  soft  in  the 
dairy  flaccidness  of  modern  ivory ;  and  clear  and 
powerful  in  the  dark  terra  cotta,  which  can  ennoble 
even  the  fattest  and  flattest  faces  with  its  wonderful 
faculty  for  making  mere  surface  markings,  mere 
crowsfeet,  interesting.  Thus  also  with  bronze  :  the 
polished,  worked  bronze,  of  fine  chocolate  burnish 
and  reddish  reflections,  mars  all  beauty  of  line  ;  how 
different  the  unchased,  merely  rough  cast,  greenish, 
with  infinite  delicate  greys  and  browns,  making,  for 
instance,  the  head  of  an  old  woman  like  an  exquisite, 
withered,  shrivelled,  veined  autumnal  leaf.  It  is 
17 


242  EUPHORION. 

moreover,  as  I  have  said,  a  question  of  combination  of 
surface  and  light,  this  art  which  makes  beautiful  busts 
•of  ugly  men.  The  ideal  statue  of  the  Greeks  intended 
for  the  open  air  ;  fit  to  be  looked  at  under  any  light, 
high  or  low,  brilliant  or  veiled,  had  indeed  to  be  pre- 
pared to  look  well  under  any  light ;  but  to  look  well 
under  any  light  means  not  to  use  any  one  particular 
relation  of  light  as  an  ally  ;  the  surface  was  kept 
modestly  subordinated  to  the  features,  the  features 
which  must  needs  look  well  at  all  moments  and  from 
all  points  of  view.  But  the  Renaissance  sculptor 
knew  where  his  work  would  be  placed  ;  he  could  cal- 
culate the  effect  of  the  light  falling  invariably  through 
this  or  that  window ;  he  could  make  a  fellow-workman 
of  that  light,  present  for  it  to  draw  or  to  obliterate 
what  features  he  liked,  bid  it  sweep  away  such  or  such 
surfaces  with  a  broad  stream,  cut  them  with  a  deep 
shadow,  caress  their  smooth  chiselling  or  their  rough 
grainings,  mark  as  with  a  nail  the  few  large  strokes  of 
the  point  which  gave  the  firmness  to  the  strained 
muscle  or  stretched  skin.  Out  of  this  model  of  his, 
this  plain  old  burgess,  he  and  his  docile  friend  the  light, 
could  make  quite  a  new  thing ;  a  new  pattern  of  bosses 
and  cavities,  of  smooth  sweeps  and  tracked  lines,  of 
■creases  and  folds  of  flesh,  of  pliable  linen  and  rough 
brocade  of  dress  :  something  new,  something  which, 
without  a  single  feature  being  straightened  or  short- 
ened, yet  changed  completely  the  value  of  the  whole 
assemblage  of  features  ;  something  undreamed  of  by 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  243 

nature  in  moulding  that  ugly  old  merchant  or  humanist. 
With  this  art  which  produced  works  like  Desiderio 
da  Settignano's  Carlo  Marsuppini  and  Benedetto  da 
Maiano's  Pietro  Mellini,  is  intimately  connected  the 
art  of  the  great  medallists  of  the  Renaissance — Pasti, 
Guacialotti,  Niccolo  Fiorentino,  and,  greatest  of  all, 
Pisanello.  Its  excellence  depends  precisely  upon  its 
independence  of  the  ideal  work  of  Antiquity  ;  nay, 
even  upon  the  fact  that,  while  the  ancients,  striking 
their  coins  in  chased  metal  dies,  obtained  an  astonish- 
ing minuteness  and  clearness  of  every  separate  little 
stroke  and  dint,  and  were  therefore  forced  into  an 
almost  more  than  sculptural  perfection  of  mere  line, 
of  mere  profile  and  throat  and  elaborately  composed 
hair,  a  sort  of  sublime  abstraction  of  the  possible 
beauty  of  a  human  face,  as  in  the  coins  of  Syracuse 
and  also  of  Alexander ;  the  men  of  the  fifteenth 
century  employed  the  process  of  casting  the  bronze 
in  a  concave  mould  obtained  by  the  melting  away  of 
a  medallion  in  wax  ;  in  wax,  which  taking  the  living 
impress  of  the  artist's  finger,  and  recalling  in  its  firm 
and  yet  soft  texture  the  real  substance  of  the  human 
face,  insensibly  led  the  medallist  to  seek,  not  sharp 
and  abstract  lines,  but  simple,  strongly  moulded 
bosses  ;  not  ideal  beauty,  but  the  real  appearance  of 
life.  It  is,  moreover,  a  significant  fact  that  while  the 
men  who,  half  a  century  or  so  later,  made  fine,  charac- 
terless die-stamped  medals  in  imitation  of  the  antique, 
Caradossi    and  Benvenuto   for   instance,  were    gold- 


244  EUPHORION. 

smiths  and  sculptors,  workers  with  the  chisel,  artists 
seeking  essentially  for  abstract  elegance  of  line  ;  the 
two  greatest  medallists  of  the  early  Renaissance, 
Vittore  Pisano  and  Matteo  di  Pasti,  were  both  of  them 
painters ;  and  painters  of  the  Northern  Italian  school, 
to  whom  colour  and  texture  were  all  important,  and 
linear  form  a  matter  of  indifference.  And  indeed,  if 
we  look  at  the  best  work  of  what  I  may  call  the  wax 
mould  medallists  of  the  fifteenth  century,  even  at  the 
magnificent  marble  medallions  of  the  laurel-wreathed 
head  of  Sigismund  Malatesta  on  the  pillars  of  his 
church  at  Rimini,  modelled  by  Pasti,  we  shall  see 
that  these  men  were  preoccupied  almost  exclusively 
with  the  almost  pictorial  effect  of  the  flesh  in  its, 
various  degrees  of  boss  and  of  reaction  of  the  light  ; 
and  that  the  character,  the  beauty  even,  which  they 
attained,  is  essentially  due  to  a  skilful  manipulation 
of  texture,  and  surface,  and  light — one  might  almost 
say  of  colour.  We  all  know  Pisanello's  famous  heads 
of  the  Malatesti  of  Rimini :  the  saturnine  Sigismund, 
the  delicate  dapper  Novello,  the  powerful  yet  beauti- 
ful Isotta  ;  but  there  are  other  Renaissance  medals 
which  illustrate  my  meaning  even  better,  and  connect 
my  feelings  on  the  subject  of  this  branch  of  art  more 
clearly  with  my  feelings  towards  such  work  as  Bene- 
detto's Pietro  Mellini.  Foremost  among  these  is 
the  perhaps  somewhat  imperfect  and  decidedly  gro- 
tesque, but  astonishingly  powerful,  naif  and  character- 
istic Lorenzo  dei  Medici   by  Niccolo  Fiorentino,  the 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  ^45 

real  grandeur  of  whose  conception  of  this  coarse  yet 
imaginative  head  may  be  profitably  contrasted  with 
the  classicizing  efforts  after  the  demi-god  or  successor 
of  Alexander  in  Pollaiolo's  famous  medal  of  the  Pazzi 
conspiracy.     Next  to  this  I  would  place  a  medal  by 
Guacialotti   of    Bishop    Niccolo    Palmieri,   with   the 
motto,  "Nudus  egressus  sic  redibo  "—singularly  ap- 
propri'ate  to  the  shameless  fleshliness  of  the  personage, 
with  his  naked  fat  chest  and  shoulders,  his  fat,  pig- 
like cheeks  and  greasy-looking  bald  head  ;  a  hideous 
beast,  vet  magnificent  in  his  bestiality  like  some  huge 
fattened  porker.     These  medals  give  us,  as  does  the 
bust  of  Pietro  Mellini,  beauty  of  the  portrait  despite 
ugliness  of  the  original.     But  there   are  two   other 
medals,  this  time  by  Pisanello,  and,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  perhaps  his  masterpieces,  which  show  the  quite 
peculiar  way  in  which  this  homely  charm  of  portrai- 
ture amalgamates,  so  as  to  form  a  homogeneous  and 
most  seemingly  simple  whole,  with  the  homely  charm 
of  certain  kinds  of  pure  and  simple  youthful  types. 
One  of  these  (the  reverse  of  which  fantastically  repre- 
.  sents  the  four  elements,  the  wooded  earth,  the  starry 
sky,  the  rippled  sea,  the  sun,  all  in  one  sphere)  is  the 
portrait   of  Don    Inigo  d'Avalos  ;  the  other  that   of 
Cecilia  Gonzaga.     This  slender  beardless  boy  in  the 
Spanish  shovel  hat  and  wisp  of  scarf  twisted  round 
the  throat;  and  this  tall,  long-necked  girl,  with  sloping 
shoulders  and  still  half-developed  bosom ;  are,  so  to 
speak,  brother  and  sister  in  art,  in  Pisanello's  wonder- 


246  E  UP  H  ORION. 

ful  genius.  The  relief  of  the  two  medals  is  extremely 
low,  so  that  in  certain  lights  the  effigies  vanish  almost 
completely,  sink  into  the  pale  green  surface  of  the 
bronze  ;  the  portraits  are  a  mere  film,  a  sort  of  haze 
which  has  arisen  on  the  bronze  and  gathered  into 
human  likeness  ;  but  in  this  film,  this  scarce  percep- 
tible relief,  we  are  made  to  perceive  the  slender  osseous 
structure,  the  smooth,  sleek,  childish  blond  flesh  and 
hair,  the  delicate,  undecided  pallor  of  extreme  youth 
and  purity,  even  as  we  might  in  some  elaborate  por- 
trait by  Velasquez,  but  with  a  springlike  healthiness 
which  Velasquez,  painting  his  lymphatic  Hapsburgs, 
rarely  has. 

Such  is  this  Renaissance  art  of  medals,  this  side 
branch  of  the  great  realistic  portraiture  in  stone  of 
the  Benedettos,  Desiderios,  and  Rossellinos  ;  a  perfect 
thing  in  itself;  and  one  which,  if  we  muse  over  it  in 
connection  with  the  more  important  works  of  fifteenth 
century  sculpture,  will  perhaps  lead  us  to  think  that,, 
as  the  sculpture  of  Antiquity,  in  its  superb  idealism, 
its  devotion  to  the  perfect  line  and  curve  of  beauty, 
achieved  the  highest  that  mere  colourless  art  can 
achieve — thanks  to  the  very  purity,  sternness,  and  nar- 
rowness of  its  sculpturesque  feeling — so  also,  perhaps, 
modern  sculpture,  should  it  ever  re-arise,  must  be 
a  continuation  of  the  tendencies  of  the  Renaissance, 
must  be  the  humbler  sister  of  painting,  must  seek  for 
the  realistic  portrait  and  begin,  perhaps,  with  the 
realistic  medal. 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART,  ^^'^ 


II. 


This  kind  of  realism,  where  only  the  model  is  ugly^ 
while  the  portrait  is  beautiful ;  which  seeks  decorative 
value  by  other  means  than  the  intrinsic  excellence  of 
form  in  the  object  represented,  this  kind  of  realism  is 
quite  different  in  sort  from  the  realisms  of  immature 
art,  which,  aiming  at  nothing  beyond  a  faithful  copy, 
is  content  with  producing  an  ugly  picture  of  an  ugly 
thing.     Now  this   latter  kind  of  realism  endured  in 
painting  some  time  after  decorative  realism  such  as  I 
have    described  had  reached  perfection  in  sculpture. 
Nor  was  it  till  later,  and  when  the  crude  scholastic 
realism  had  completely  come  to  an  end,  that  there 
became  even  partially  possible  in  painting  decorative 
realism  analogous  to  what  we  have  noticed  in  sculp- 
ture ;  while  it  was  not  till  after  the  close  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance  period  that  the  painters  arose  in  Spain 
and  the  Netherlands  who  were  able  to  treat   their 
subjects  with  the  uncompromising  decorative  realism 
of   Desiderio  or  Rosellino  or  Benedetto  da  Maiano. 
For  the  purely  imitative  realism  of  the  painters  of 
the  early  Renaissance  was  succeeded  in  Italy  by  ideal- 
ism, which  matured  in  the  great  art  of  intrinsically 
beautiful  linear  form  of  Michael  Angelo  and  Raphael. 
and    the    great  art    of  intrinsically  beautiful    colour 
form  of  Giorgione  and  Titian.     These   two   schools 
were    bound    to    be,   each    in    its   degree,   idealistic. 
Complete  power  of  mere  representation  in  tint  and 


248  EUPHORION 

colour  having  been  obtained  through  the  realistic 
drudgery  of  the  early  Renaissance,  selection  in  the 
objects  thus  to  be  represented  had  naturally  arisen ; 
and  the  study  of  the  antique  had  further  hastened 
and  directed  this  movement  of  art  no  longer  to  study 
but  to  achieve,  to  be  decorative  once  more,  decorative 
no  longer  in  subservience  to  architecture,  but  as  the 
separate  and  self-sufficing  art  of  painting.  Selec- 
tion, therefore,  which  is  the  only  practical  kind  of 
idealism,  had  begun  as  soon  as  painting  was  possessed 
of  the  power  of  representing  objects  in  their  relations 
of  line  and  colour,  with  that  amount  of  light  and 
shadow  requisite  to  the  just  appreciation  of  the  rela- 
tions of  form  and  the  just  relations  of  colour.  Now  art 
which  stops  short  at  this  point  of  representation  must 
inevitably  be,  if  decorative  at  all,  idealistically  decora- 
tive ;  it  must  be  squeamish  respecting  the  objects 
represented,  respecting  their  real  structure,  colour, 
position,  and  grouping.  For,  of  the  visible  impres- 
sions received  from  an  object,  some  are  far  more 
intrinsic  than  others.  Suppose  we  see  a  woman, 
beautiful  in  the  structure  of  her  body,  and  beautiful 
in  the  colour  of  her  person  and  her  draperies,  standing 
under  a  light  which  is  such  as  we  should  call  beautiful 
and  interesting :  of  these  three  qualities  one  will  be 
intrinsic  in  the  woman,  the  second  very  considerably 
so,  the  third  not  at  all.  For,  let  us  call  that  woman 
away  and  replace  her  immediately  by  another  woman 
chosen  at   random.     We  shall  immediately  perceive 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  '     249 

that  we  have  lost  one  pleasurable  impression,  that  of 
beautiful  bodily  structure :  the  woman  has  taken  away 
her  well-shapen  body.  Next  we  shall  perceive  a 
notable  diminution  in  the  second  pleasurable  impres- 
sion :  the  woman  has  taken  with  her,  not  indeed  her 
well-tinted  garments,  which  we  may  have  bestowed 
•on  her  successor,  but  her  beautifully  coloured  skin 
■and  hair,  so  that  of  the  pleasing  colour-impression 
will  remain  only  as  much  as  was  due  to,  and  may 
have  been  retained  with,  the  original  woman's  clothes. 
But  if  we  look  for  our  third  pleasurable  impression, 
our  beautiful  light,  we  shall  find  that  unchanged, 
whether  it  fall  upon  a  magnificently  arrayed  goddess 
or  upon  a  sordid  slut.  And,  conversely,  the  beautiful 
woman,  when  withdrawn  from  that  light  and  placed 
in  any  other,  will  be  equally  lovely  in  form,  even  if 
we  cast  her  in  plaster,  and  lose  the  colour  of  her  skin 
and  hair  ;  or  if  we  leave  her  not  only  the  beautiful 
tints  of  her  flesh  and  hair,  but  her  own  splendidly 
coloured  garments,  we  shall  still  have,  in  whatsoever 
light,  a  magnificent  piece  of  colour.  But  if  we  recall 
the  poor  ugly  creature  who  has  succeeded  her  from 
out  of  that  fine  effect  of  light,  we  shall  have  nothing 
but  a  hideous  form  invested  in  hideous  colour. 

This  rough  diagram  will  be  sufficient  to  explain 
«iy  thought  respecting  the  relative  degree  to  which 
the  art  dealing  with  linear  form,  that  dealing  with 
colour  and  that  dealing  with  light,  with  the  medium 
in   which   form    and    colour   are   perceived  ;  is   each 


250  E  UP  NORTON. 

respectively  bound  to  be  idealistically  or  realistically 
decorative.     Now   painting  was  aesthetically  mature, 
possessed  the  means  to  achieve  great  beauty,  at  a  time 
when  of  the  three  modes  of  representation  there  had 
as  yet  developed  only  those  of  linear  form  and  colour; 
and  the  very  possibility  and  necessity  of  immediately 
achieving  all  that  could  be  achieved  by  these  means 
delayed  for  a  long  time  the  development  of  the  third 
mode  of  representation  :  the  representation  of  objects 
as  they  appear  with  reference  to  the    light  through 
which  they  are  seen.     A  beginning  had  indeed  been 
made.     Certain  of  Correggio's  effects  of  light,  even 
more  an  occasional  manner  of  treating  the  flesh  and 
hair,  reducing  both  form  and  colour  to  a  kind  of  vague 
boss  and  vague  sheen,  such  as  they  really  present  in 
given  effects  of  light,  a  something  which  we  define 
roughly  as  eminently  modern  in  the  painting  of  his 
clustered  cherubs;  all  this  is  certainly  a  beginning  of 
the  school  of  Velasquez.     Still  more  so  is  it  the  case 
with  Andrea  del  Sarto,  the  man  of  genius  whom  critics 
love  to  despatch  as    a    mediocrity,  because    his  art, 
which  is  art  altogether  for  the  eyes,  and  in  which  he 
innovated  more  than  any  of  his  contemporaries,  does 
not  afford  any  excuse  for  the  irrelevancies  of  orna- 
mental criticism  ;   with  him  the  appearance  of  form 
and  colour,  acted  upon  by  light,  the  relative  values  of 
which  flesh  and  draperies  consist   with  reference  to 
the  surrounding  medium,  all  this  becomes  so  evident 
a  preoccupation  and  a  basis  for  decorative  effects,  as 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  251 

to  give  certain  of  his  works  an  almost  startling  air  of 
being  modern.  But  this  tendency  comes  to  nothing  : 
the  men  of  the  sixteenth  century  appear  scarcely  to 
have  perceived  wherein  lay  the  true  excellence  of  this 
"Andrea  senza  errori,"  deeming  him  essentially  the 
artist  of  linear  perfection  ;  while  the  innovations  of 
Correggio  in  the  way  of  showing  the  relations  of  flesh 
tones  and  light  ended  in  the  mere  coarse  gala 
illuminations  in  which  his  successors  made  their 
seraphs  plunge  and  sprawl.  There  was  too  much  to 
be  done,  good  and  bad,  in  the  way  of  mere  linear  form 
and  mere  colour ;  and  as  art  of  mere  linear  form  and 
colour,  indifferent  of  all  else,  did  the  art  of  the  Italian 
Renaissance  run  to  seed. 

I  said  at  the  beginning  of  this  paper  that  the  degree 
to  which  any  art  is  strictly  idealistic,  can  be  measured 
by  the  terms  which  it  will  make  with  portrait.  For  as 
portrait  is  due  to  the  desire  to  represent  a  person  quite 
apart  from  that  person  affording  material  for  decora- 
tion, it  is  evident  that  only  the  art  which  can  call 
in  the  assistance  of  decorative  materials,  independent 
of  the  represented  individual,  can  possibly  make  a 
beautiful  picture  out  of  an  ugly  man  ;  while  the  art 
which  deals  only  with  such  visible  peculiarities  as  are 
inherent  in  the  individual,  has  no  kind  of  outlet,  is 
cornered,  and  can  make  of  a  repulsive  original  only 
a  repulsive  picture.  The  analogy  to  this  we  have 
already  noticed  in  sculpture :  antique  sculpture,  con- 
sidering only  the  linear  bosses  which  existed  equally 


252  EUPHORION. 

in  the  living  man  and  in  the  statue,  could  not  afford 
to  represent  plain  people  ;  while  Renaissance  sculp- 
ture, extracting  a  large  amount  of  beauty  out  of  com- 
binations of  surface  and  light,  was  able,  as  long  as  it 
could  arrange  such  an  artificial  combination,  to  dis- 
pense with  great  perfection  in  the  model.  Nay,  if  we 
except  Renaissance  statuary  as  a  kind  of  separate 
art,  we  may  say  that  this  independence  of  the  object 
portrayed  is  a  kind  of  analytic  test,  enabling  us  to 
judge  at  a  glance,  and  by  the  degree  of  independence 
from  the  model,  the  degree  to  which  any  art  is  re- 
moved from  the  mere  line  and  boss  of  antique  sculp- 
ture. In  the  statue  standing  free  in  any  light  that 
may  chance  to  come,  every  form  must  be  beautiful 
from  every  point  ;  but  in  proportion  as  the  new  ele- 
ments of  painting  enter,  in  proportion  as  the  actual 
linear  form  and  boss  is  marked  and  helped  out  by 
grouping,  colour,  and  light  and  shade,  does  the  actual 
perfection  of  the  model  become  less  important ;  until, 
under  the  reign  of  light  as  the  chief  factor,  it  becomes 
altogether  indifferent.  In  this  fact  lies  the  only 
rational  foundation  for  the  notion,  made  popular  by 
Hegel,  that  painting  is  an  art  in  which  beauty  is  of 
much  less  account  than  in  sculpture  ;  failing  to  under- 
stand that  the  sum  total  of  beauty  remained  the  same, 
whether  dependent  upon  the  concentration  of  a  single 
element  or  obtained  by  the  co-operation  of  several 
consequently  less  singly  important  elements. 

But  to  return  to  the  question  of  portrait  art.     From 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  253 

what  we  have  seen,  it  is  clear  that  art  which  requires 
perfection  of  form  will  be  reduced  to  ugliness  if 
cramped  in  the  obtaining  of  such  perfection,  whereas 
art  which  can  obtain  beauty  by  other  means  will  still 
have  a  chance  when  reduced  to  imitate  ugly  objects. 
Hence  it  is  that  while  the  realistically  decorative  art 
of  the  seventeenth  century  can  make  actually  beauti- 
ful things  of  the  portraits  of  ugly  people,  the  ideal- 
istically  decorative  art  of  the  Renaissance  produces 
portraits  which  are  cruelly  ugly  in  proportion  as  the 
art  is  purely  idealistic.  Yet  even  in  idealism  there 
are  degrees  :  the  more  the  art  is  confined  to  mere 
linear  form,  to  the  exclusion  of  colour,  the  uglier  will  be 
the  portraits.  With  Michael  Angelo  the  difficulty  was 
simplified  to  impossibihty  :  he  could  not  paint  portrait 
at  all ;  and  in  his  sculptured  portraits  of  the  two 
Medicean  dukes  at  S.  Lorenzo  he  evaded  all  attempt 
at  likeness,  making  those  two  men  into  scarcely  more 
than  two  architectural  monsters,  half-human  cousins 
of  the  fantastic  creatures  who  keep  watch  on  the 
belfries  and  gurgoyles  of  a  Gothic  cathedral.  It  is 
almost  impossible  to  think  of  Michael  Angelo  attempt- 
ing portrait :  the  man's  genius  cannot  be  constrained 
to  it,  and  what  ought  to  be  mere  ugliness  would  come 
out  idealized  into  grandiose  monstrosity.  Men  like 
Titian  and  Tintoret  are  at  the  other  end  of  the  scale 
of  ideal  decoration  :  they  are  bordering  upon  the 
domain  of  realism.  Hence  they  can  raise  into  interest, 
by  the  mere  power  of  colour,  many  an  insignificant 


^34  E  UP  HO  R  ION. 

type  ;  yet  even  they  are  incapable  of  dealing  with 
absolute  ugliness,  with  absence  of  fine  colour,  or,  if 
they  do  deal  with  it,  there  is  an  immediate  improve- 
ment upon  the  model,  and  the  appearance  of  truthful- 
ness goes.  Between  the  absolute  incapacity  for  deal- 
ing with  ugliness  of  Michael  Angelo,  and  the  power  of 
compromising  with  it  of  Titian  and  Tintoret,  Raphael 
stands  half-way  :  he  can  call  in  the  assistance  of  colour 
just  sufficiently  to  create  a  setting  of  carefully  har- 
monized draperies  and  accessories,  beautiful  enough 
to  allow  of  his  filling  it  up  with  the  most  cruelly  ugly 
likeness  which  any  painter  ever  painted.  Far  too 
much  has  been  written  about  Raphael  in  general,  but 
not  half  enough  about  Raphael  as  a  portrait-painter  ; 
for  by  the  side  of  the  eclectic  idealist,  who  combined 
and  balanced  beauty  almost  into  insipidity,  is  the  most 
terribly,  inflexibly  veracious  portrait-painter  that  ever 
was.  Compared  with  those  sternly  straightforward 
portraits  of  his  Florentine  and  Roman  time,  where 
ugliness  and  baseness  are  never  attenuated  by  one 
tittle,  and  alloyed  nobility  or  amiability,  as  with  his 
finer  models,  like  the  two  Bonis,  husband  and  wife, 
and  Bibbiena,  is  never  purified  of  its  troubling  ele- 
ment ;  compared  with  them  the  Venetian  portraits 
are  mere  insincere,  enormously  idealized  pieces  of 
colour-harmony  ;  nay,  the  portraits  of  Velasquez  are 
mere  hints — given  rapidly  by  a  sickened  painter  striv- 
ing to  make  those  scrofulous  Hapsburgs  no  longer 
mere    men,  but  keynotes  of  harmonies  of  light — of 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  255 

what  the  people  really  are.  For  Velasquez  seems  to 
show  us  the  temperament,  the  potentiality  of  his 
people,  and  to  leave  us,  with  a  kind  of  dignified  and 
melancholy  silence  as  to  all  further,  to  find  out  what 
life,  what  feelings  and  actions,  such  a  temperament 
implies.  But  Raphael  shows  us  all  :  the  temperament 
and  the  character,  the  real  active  creature,  with  all  the 
marks  of  his  present  temper  and  habits,  with  all  the 
indications  of  his  immediate  actions  upon  him  :  com- 
pletely without  humour  or  bitterness,  without  the 
smallest  tendency  to  twist  the  reality  into  caricature 
or  monstrosity,  nay,  perhaps  without  much  psychologic 
analysis  to  tell  him  the  exact  meaning  of  what  he  is 
painting,  going  straight  to  the  point,  and  utterly  ruth- 
less from  sheer  absence  of  all  alternative  of  doing 
otherwise  than  he  does.  There  is  nothing  more 
cruelly  realistic  in  the  world,  cruel  not  only  to  the 
base  originals  but  to  the  feelings  of  the  spectator, 
than  the  harmony  of  villainies,  of  various  combina- 
tions of  black  and  hog-like  bestiality,  and  fox  and 
wolf-like  cunning  and  ferocity  with  wicked  human 
thought  and  self-command,  which  Raphael  has  en- 
shrined in  that  splendid  harmony  of  scarlet  silk  and 
crimson  satin,  and  purple  velvet  and  dull  white 
brocade,  as  the  portraits  of  Leo  X.  and  his  cardinals 
Rossi  and  Dei  Medici. 

The  idealistic  painter,  accustomed  to  rely  upon  the 
intrinsic  beauty  which  he  has  hitherto  been  able  to 
select  or  create  ;  accustomed  also  to  think  of  form  as 


256  E  UP  NORTON. 

something  quite  independent  of  the  medium  through 
which  it  is  seen,  scarcely  conscious  of  the  existence 
of  light  and  air  in  his  habit  of  concentrating  all  at- 
tention upon  a  figure  placed,  as  it  were,  in  a  sort  of 
vacuum  of  indifference ; — this  idealistic  artist  is  left 
without  any  resources  when  bid  to  paint  an  ugly 
man  or  woman.  With  the  realistic  artist,  to  whom 
the  man  or  woman  is  utterly  indifferent,  to  whom  the 
medium  in  which  they  are  seen  is  everything,  the  case 
is  just  reversed  :  let  him  arrange  his  light,  his  atmo- 
spheric effect,  and  he  will  work  into  their  pattern  no 
matter  what  plain  or  repulsive  wretch.  To  Velasquez 
the  flaccid  yellowish  fair  flesh,  with  its  grey  downy 
shadows,  the  limp  pale  drab  hair,  which  is  grey  in  the 
light  and  scarcely  perceptibly  blond  in  the  shade,  all 
this  unhealthy,  bloodless,  feebly  living,  effete  mass  of 
humanity  called  Philip  IV.  of  Spain,  shivering  in 
moral  anaemia  like  some  dog  thorough  bred  into 
nothingness,  becomes  merely  the  foundation  for  a 
splendid  harmony  of  pale  tints.  Again,  the  poor 
little  baby  princess,  with  scarce  visible  features,  seem- 
ingly kneaded  (buf  not  sufficiently  pinched  and 
modelled)  out  of  the  wet  ashes  of  an  auto  dafe,  in 
her  black-and-white  frock  (how  different  from  the 
dresses  painted  by  Raphael  and  Titian !),  dingy  and 
gloomy  enough  for  an  abbess  or  a  cameriera  major, 
this  childish  personification  of  courtly  dreariness, 
certainly  bom  on  an  Ash  Wednesday,  becomes  the 
principal  strands  for  a  marvellous  tissue  of  silvery,  and 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  257 

ashy  light,  tinged  yellowish  in  the  hair,  bluish  in  the 
eyes  and  downy  cheeks,  pale  red  in  the  lips  and  the 
rose  in  the  hair;  something  to  match  which  in  beauty 
you  must  think  of  some  rarely  seen  veined  and 
jaspered  rainy  twilight,  or  opal-tinted  hazy  winter 
morning.  Ugliness,  nay,  repulsiveness,  vanish,  sub- 
dued into  beauty,  even  as  noxious  gases  may  be  sub- 
dued into  health-giving  substances  by  some  cunning 
chemist.  The  difference  between  such  portraits  as 
these  and  the  portraits  by  Raphael  does  not  however 
consist  merely  in  the  beauty  :  there  is  also  the  fact 
that  if  you  take  one  of  Velasquez's  portraits  out  of 
their  frame,  reconstitute  the  living  individual,  and  bid 
him  walk  forth  in  whatsoever  light  may  fall  upon  hin;, 
\'ou  will  have  something  infinitely  different  from  the 
portrait,  and  of  which  your  only  distinct  feeling  will 
be  that  a  fine  portrait  might  be  made  of  the  creature  ; 
whereas  it  is  a  matter  of  complete  indifference  whether 
you  see  Raphael's  Leo  X.  in  the  flesh  or  in  his  gilded 
frame. 

Whatever  may  fairly  be  said  respecting  the  relative 
value  of  idealistic  and  realistic  decorative  art  is  really 
also  connected  with  this  latter  point.  Considering 
that  realistic  art  is  merely  obtaining  beauty  by  atten- 
tion to  other  factors  than  those  which  preoccupy 
idealistic  art,  that  the  one  fulfils  what  the  other  neg- 
lects— taking  the  matter  from  this  point  of  view,  it 
would  seem  as  if  the  two  kinds  of  arts   were,  so  to 

■speak,  morally  equal ;  and   that  any  vague  sense  of 

18 


2i;8  EUPHORION. 

mysterious  superior  dignity  clinging  to  idealistic  art 
was  a  mere  shred  of  long  discarded  pedantry.  But 
it  is  not  so.  For  realistic  art  does  more  than  merely 
bring  into  play  powers  unknown  to  idealistic  art :  it 
becomes,  by  the  possession  of  these  powers,  utterly 
indifferent  to  the  intrinsic  value  of  the  forms  repre- 
sented :  it  is  so  certain  of  making  everything  lovely  by 
its  harmonies  of  light  and  atmosphere  that  it  almost 
prefers  to  choose  inferior  things  for  this  purpose. 
I  am  thinking  at  present  of  a  picture  by  I  forget  what 
Dutchman  in  our  National  Gallery,  representing  in 
separate  compartments  five  besotten-looking  creatures, 
symbolical  of  the  five  senses  :  they  are  ugly,  brutish, 
with  I  know  not  what  suggestion  of  detestable  tem- 
perament in  their  bloodshot  flesh  and  vermilion  lips, 
as  if  the  whole  man  were  saturated  with  his  appetite. 
Yet  the  Dutchman  has  found  the  means  of  making 
these  degraded  types  into  something  which  we  care 
to  look  at,  and  to  look  at  on  account  of  its  beauty  ; 
even  as,  in  lesser  degree,  Rubens  has  always  managed 
to  make  us  feel  towards  his  flaccid,  veal-complexioned, 
fish-eyed  women,  something  of  what  we  feel  towards 
the  goddesses  of  the  Parthenon  ;  towards  the  white- 
robed,  long-gloved  ladies,  with  meditative  face  beneath 
their  crimped  auburn  hair,  of  Titian. 

Viewed  in  one  way,  there  is  a  kind  of  nobility  in 
the  very  fact  that  such  realistic  art  can  make  us 
pardon,  can  redeem,  nay  almost  sanctify,  so  much. 
But  is  it  right  thus  to  pardon,  redeem,  and  sanctify;. 


THE  PORTRAIT  ART.  259- 

thus  to  bring  the  inferior  on  to  the  lev^el  of  the  su- 
perior ?  Nay,  is  it  not  rather  wrong  to  teach  us  to 
endure  so  much  meanness  and  ugUness  in  creatures, 
on  account  of  the  nobihty  with  which  they  are  repre- 
sented ?  Is  this  not  vitiating  our  feelings,  blunting 
our  desire  for  the  better,  our  repugnance  for  the 
worse  ? 

A  great  and  charitable  art,  this  realistic  art  of  the 
seventeenth  century,  and  to  be  respected  for  its  very 
tenderness  towards  the  scorned  and  castaway  things 
of  reality;  but  accustoming  us,  perhaps  too  much,  like 
all  charitable  and  reclaiming  impulses,  to  certain  un- 
worthy contacts  :  in  strange  contrast  herein  with  that 
narrow  but  ascetic  and  aristocratic  art  of  idealism,, 
which,  isolated  and  impoverished  though  it  may  be, 
has  always  the  dignity  of  its  immaculate  purity,  of  its 
unswerving  judgment,  of  its  obstinate  determination 
to  deal  only  with  the  best.  A  hard  task  to  judge 
between  them.  But  be  this  as  it  may,  it  is  one  of  the 
singular  richnesses  of  the  Italian  Renaissance  that 
it  knew  of  both  tendencies  ;  that  while  in  painting 
it  gave  the  equivalent  of  that  rigid  idealism  of  the 
Greeks  which  can  make  no  compromise  with  ugli- 
ness ;  in  sculpture  it  possessed  the  equivalent  of  the 
realism  of  Velasquez,  which  can  make  beauty  out  of 
ugly  things,  even  as  the  chemist  can  make  sugar  out 
of  vitriol. 


THE    SCHOOL    OF    BOIARDO. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO. 


"  Le  donne,  i  cavalier,  1'  armi,  gli  amori." 

I. 

Throughout  the  tales  of  Charlemagne  and  his 
warriors,  overtopping  by  far  the  crowd  of  paladins 
and  knights,  move  two  colossal  mailed  and  vizored 
figures — Roland,  whom  the  Italians  call  Orlando  and 
the  Spaniards  Roldan,  the  son  of  Milon  d'Angers  and 
of  Charlemagne's  sister ;  and  Renaud  or  Rinaldo,  the 
lord  of  Montauban,  and  eldest  of  the  famous  four  sons 
of  Aymon.  These  are  the  two  representative  heroes, 
equal  but  opposed,  the  Achilles  and  Odysseus,  the 
Siegfried  and  Dietrich,  of  the  Carolingian  epic  ;  and 
in  each  is  personified,  by  the  unconscious  genius  of 
the  early  Middle  Ages,  one  of  the  great  political 
movements,  of  the  heroic  struggles,  of  feudalism. 
For  there  existed  in  feudalism  two  forces,  a  centri- 
petal and  a  centrifugal — a  force  which  made  for  the 
supremacy  of  the  kingly  overlordship,  and  a  force 
which  made  for  the  independence  of  the  great  ^^assals. 


;.64  EUPHORIC  N. 

Hence,  in  the  poetry  which  is  the  poetry  of  feudalism, 
two  distinct  currents  of  feehng,  two  distinct  epics— the 
epic  of  the  devoted  loyalty  of  all  the  heroes  of  France 
to  their  wise  and  mighty  emperor  Charlemagne, 
triumphant  even  in  misfortune  ;  and  the  epic  of  the 
hopeless  resistance  against  a  craven  and  capricious 
despot  Charles  of  the  most  righteous  and  whole- 
hearted among  his  feudataries  :  the  epic  of  Roland, 
and  the  epic  of  Renaud.  Of  the  first  there  remains 
to  us,  in  its  inflexible  and  iron  solemnity,  an  original 
rhymed  narrative,  "  The  Chanson  de  Roland,"  which 
we  may  read  perhaps  almost  in  the  selfsame  words  in 
which  it  was  sung  by  the  Normans  of  William  in  their 
night  watch  before  the  great  battle.  The  centripetal 
force  of  feudalism  gained  the  upper  hand,  and  the 
song  of  the  great  empire,  of  the  great  deeds  of 
loyal  prowess,  was  consecrated  in  the  feudal  monarchy. 
The  case  was  different  with  the  tale  of  resistance  and 
rebellion.  The  story  of  Renaud  soon  became  a  dan- 
gerous lesson  for  the  great  barons  ;  it  fell  from  the 
hands  of  the  nobles  to  those  of  humbler  folk;  and  it  is 
preserved  to  us  no  longer  in  mediaeval  verse,  but  in  a 
prose  version,  doubtless  of  the  fifteenth  century,  under 
the  name,  familiar  on  the  stalls  of  village  fairs,  of  '•  Les 
Quatre  Fils  Aymon."  But,  as  Renaud  is  the  equal  of 
Roland,  so  is  this  humble  prose  tale  nevertheless  the 
equal  of  the  great  song  of  Roncevaux ;  and  even  now, 
it  would  be  a  difficult  task  to  decide  which  were  the 
grander,  the  tale  of  loyalty  or  the  tale  of  resistance. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  265 

In  each  of  these  tales,  the  "  Chanson  de  Roland  "  and 
the  "  Quatre  Fils  Aymon,"  there  is  contained  a  picture 
of  its  respective  hero,  which  sums  up,  as  it  were,  the 
whole  noble  character  of  the  book  ;  and  which,  the 
picture  of  the  dying  Roland  and  the  picture  of  the 
dying  Renaud,  I  would  fain  bring  before  you  before 
speaking  of  the  other  Roland  and  the  other  Renaud, 
the  Orlando  of  Ariosto  and  the  Rinaldo  of  Boiardo. 
The  traitor  Ganelon  has  enabled  King  Marsile  to 
overtake  with  all  his  heathenness  the  rear-guard  of 
Charlemagne  between  the  granite  walls  of  Roncevaux  ; 
the  Franks  have  been  massacred,  but  the  Saracens 
have  been  routed  ;  Roland  has  at  last  ceded  to  the 
prayers  of  Oliver  and  of  Archbishop  Turpin  ;  three 
times  has  he  put  to  his  mouth  his  oliphant  and  blown 
a  blast  to  call  back  Charlemagne  to  vengeance,  till 
the  blood  has  foamed  round  his  lips  and  his  temple 
has  burst.  Oliver  is  dead,  the  Archbishop  is  dying, 
Roland  himself  is  slowly  bleeding  to  death.  He  goes 
down  into  the  defile,  heaped  with  corpses,  and  seeks 
for  the  bodies  of  the  principal  paladins,  Ivon  and 
Ivaire,  the  Gascon  Engelier,  Gerier  and  Gerin,  Berenger 
and  Otho,  Anseis  and  Salamon,  and  the  old  Gerard  of 
Rousillon ;  and  one  by  one  drags  them  to  where  the 
Archbishop  lies  dying.  And  then,  when  to  these 
knights  Roland  has  at  last  added  his  own  beloved 
comrade  Oliver,  he  bids  the  Archbishop  bless  all  the 
dead,  before  he  die  himself  Then,  when  he  has  reve- 
rently crossed  Turpin's  beautiful  priestly  hands  over 


266  EUPHORION. 

his  breast,  he  goes  forth  to  shatter  his  sword  Durendal 
against  the  rocks  ;  but  the  good  sword  has  cut  the  rock 
without  shivering  ;  and  the  coldness  of  death  steals 
over  Roland.  He  stretches  himself  upon  a  hillock 
looking  towards  Spain,  and  prays  for  the  forgiveness 
of  his  sins  ;  then,  with  Durendal  and  his  ivory  horn 
by  his  side,  he  stretches  out  the  glove  of  his  right 
hand  to  God.  "  He  has  stretched  forth  to  God  the 
glove  of  his  right  hand  ;  St.  Gabriel  has  received  it. 
Then  his  head  has  sunk  on  his  arm  ;  he  has  gone,  with 
clasped  hands,  to  his  end.  God  sends  him  one  of  his 
cherubim  and  St.  Michael  of  Peril.  St.  Gabriel  has 
come  with  them.  They  carry  the  soul  of  the  Count 
up  to  paradise." 

More  solitary,  and  solemn  and  sad  even,  is  the  end 
of  the  other  hero,  of  the  great  rebel  Renaud  of  Mon- 
tauban.  At  length,  after  a  lifetime  wasted  in  fruitless 
attempts  to  resist  the  iniquity  of  the  emperor,  to 
baffle  his  power,  to  shame  him  by  magnanimity  into 
justice,  the  four  sons  of  Aymon,  who  have  given  up 
their  youth,  their  manhood,  the  dearest  things  to  their 
heart,  respect  to  their  father  and  loyalty  to  their 
sovereign,  rather  than  countenance  the  injustice  of 
Charlemagne  to  their  kinsman,  have  at  last  obtained 
to  be  pardoned  ;  to  be  pardoned,  they,  heroes,  by  a 
dastardly  tj-rant,  and  to  quietly  sink,  broken-hearted 
into  nothingness.  The  eldest,  Renaud,  returning 
from  exile  and  the  Holy  Land,  finds  that  his  wife 
Clarissehas  pined  for  him  and  died  ;  and  then,  putting 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  267 

away  his  armour  from  him,  and  dressing  in  a  pilgrim's 
frock  made  of  the  purple  serge  of  the  dead  lady's  robe, 
he  goes  forth  to  wander  through  the  world  ;  not  very 
old  in  years,  but  broken-spirited  ;  at  peace,  but  in 
solitude  of  heart.  And  one  evening  he  arrives  at 
Cologne.  We  can  imagine  the  old  knight,  only  half 
aware  of  the  sunshine  of  the  evening,  the  noise  of  the 
streets,  the  looks  of  the  crowd,  the  great  minster 
rising  half-finished  in  the  midst  of  the  town  by  the 
Rhine,  the  cries  and  noise  and  chipping  of  the  masons  ; 
unconscious  of  all  this,  half  away  :  with  his  brothers 
hiding  in  the  Ardennes,  living  on  roots  and  berries,  at 
bay  before  Charlemagne ;  or  wandering  ragged  and 
famishing  through  France  ;  with  King  Yon  brilliant 
at  Toulouse,  seeing  perhaps  for  the  first  time  his  bride 
Clarisse,  or  the  towers  of  Montauban  rising  under  the 
workmen's  hands  ;  thinking  perhaps  of  the  frightful 
siege,  when  all,  all  had  been  eaten  in  the  fortress,  and 
his  children  Aymonnet  and  Yonnet,  all  thin  and 
white,  knelt  down  and  begged  him  to  slaughter  his 
horse  Bayard  that  they  might  eat  ;  perhaps  of  that 
journey,  when  he  and  his  brothers,  all  in  red-furred 
robes  with  roses  in  their  hands,  rode  prisoners  of 
King  Charles  across  the  plain  of  Vaucouleurs  ;  perhaps 
of  when  he  galloped  up  to  the  gallows  at  Montfaucon, 
and  cut  loose  his  brother  Richard  ;  or  of  that  daring 
ride  to  Paris,  where  he  and  his  horse  won  the  race, 
snatched  the  prize  from  before  Charlemagne  and 
sped  off  crying  out  that  the  winner  was  Renaud  of 


268  EUPHORION. 

Montauban  ;  or,  perhaps,  seeing  once  more  the  sad, 
sweet  face  of  the  Lady  Clarisse,  when  she  had  burned 
all  her  precious  stuffs  and  tires  in  the  castle-yard,  and 
lay  dead  without  him  to  kiss  her  cold  mouth  ;  of 
seeing  once  more  his  good  horse  Bayard,  when  he 
kissed  him  in  his  stall  before  giving  him  to  be  killed 
by  Charlemagne.  Thinking  of  all  that  past,  seeing 
it  all  within  his  mind,  and  seeing  but  little  of  the 
present  ;  as.  in  the  low  yellow  light,  he  helped,  for  his 
bread,  the  workmen  to  heave  the  great  beams,  to 
carry  the  great  stones  of  the  cathedral,  to  split  the 
huge  marble  masses  while  they  stared  in  astonished 
envy ;  as  he  sat,  unconscious  of  their  mutterings, 
eating  his  dry  bread  and  porridge  in  the  building 
docks  by  the  river.  And  then,  when  wearied,  he  had 
sunk  to  sleep  in  the  hay-loft,  dreaming  perchance  that 
all  this  evil  life  was  but  a  dream  and  the  awakening 
therefrom  to  happiness  and  strength  ;  the  jealous  work- 
men came  and  killed  him  with  their  base  tools,  and 
cast  him  into  the  Rhine.  They  say  that  the  huge 
body  floated  on  the  water,  surrounded  by  a  great 
halo  ;  and  that  when  the  men  of  the  banks,  seeing  this, 
reverently  fished  it  out,  they  found  that  the  noble 
corpse  was  untouched  by  decay,  and  still  surrounded 
by  a  light  of  glory.  And  thus,  it  seems  to  me,  this 
Renaud,  this  rebel  baron  of  whose  reality  we  know 
nothing,  has  floated  surrounded  by  a  halo  of  poetry 
dovvn  the  black  flood  of  the  Middle  Ages  (in  which 
so  much  has  sunk)  ;  and  when  we  look  upon  his  face, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIAROD.  ogg 

and  see  its  beauty  and  strength  and  solemness,  we 
feel,  like  the  people  of  the  Rhine  bank,  inclined  to 
weep,  and  to  say  of  this  mysterious  corpse,  "  Surely 
this  is  some  great  saint." 

Of  each  of  these  heroes  thus  shown  us  by  the 
Middle  Ages,  the  Italian  Renaissance  also,  by  the 
hand  of  two  of  her  greatest  poets,  has  given  us  a 
picture.  And  first,  of  Roland.  Of  him,  of  Count 
Orlando,  we  are  told  by  Messer  Lodovico  Ariosto,  that 
in  consequence  of  his  having  discovered,  in  a  certain 
pleasant  grotto  among  the  ferns  and  maidenhair, 
words  graven  on  the  rock  (interrupted,  doubtless,  by 
the  lover's  kisses)  which  revealed  that  the  Princess 
Angelica  of  Cathay  had  disdained  him  for  Medoro, 
the  fair-haired  page  of  the  King  of  the  Moors;  Count 
Orlando  went  straightway  out  of  his  mind,  and  hanging 
up  his  armour  and  stripping  off  his  clothes,  galloped 
about  on  his  bare-backed  horse,  slaughtering  cows  and 
sheep  instead  of  Saracens  ;  until  it  pleased  God,  moved 
by  the  danger  of  Christendom  and  the  prayers  of 
Charlemagne,  to  permit  Astolfo  to  ride  on  the  hippo- 
griff's  back  up  to  the  moon,  and  bring  back  thence 
the  wits  of  the  great  paladin  contained  in  a  small  phial. 
We  all  know  that  merry  tale.  What  the  Renaissance 
has  to  say  of  Renaud  of  Montauban  is  even  stranger 
and  more  fantastic.  One  day,  says  Matteo  Boiardo, 
in  the  fifteenth  canto  of  the  second  part  of  his  "Orlando 
Innamorato,"  as  Rinaldo  of  Montalbano,the  contemner 
of  love,  was  riding  in  the  Ardennes,  he  came  to  a 


270  EUPHORION. 

clearing  in  the  forest,  where,  close  to  the  fountain  of 
Merlin,  a  wonderful  sight  met  his  eyes.  On  a  flowery 
meadow  were  dancing  three  naked  damsels,  and  sing- 
ing with  them  danced  also  a  naked  youth,  dark  of 
eyes  and  fair  of  hair,  the  first  down  on  his  lips,  so 
that  some  might  have  said  it  was  and  others  that  it 
was  not  there.  On  Rinaldo's  approach  they  broke 
through  their  singingand  dancing,andrushedupon  him, 
pelting  him  with  roses  and  hyacinths  and  violets  from 
their  baskets,  and  beating  him  with  great  sheaves  of 
lilies,  which  burnt  like  flames  through  the  plates  of  his 
armour  to  the  very  marrow  of  his  bones.  Then  when 
they  had  dragged  him,  tied  with  garlands,  by  the  feet 
round  and  round  the  meadow  ;  wings,  eyed  not  with 
the  eyes  of  a  peacock  but  with  the  eyes  of  lovely 
damsels,  suddenly  sprouted  out  of  their  shoulders,  and 
they  flew  off,  leaving  the  poor  baron,  bruised  on  the 
grass,  to  meditate  upon  the  vanity  of  all  future  resist- 
ance to  love. 

Such  are  the  things  which  the  Middle  Ages  and 
the  Renaissance  found  to  tell  us  of  the  two  great 
heroes  of  Carolingian  poetry.  And  the  explanation 
of  how  it  came  to  pass,  that  for  the  Roland  of  the 
song  of  Roncevaux  was  substituted  the  Orlando  of 
Ariosto,  and  for  the  Renaud  of  "  Les  Quatre  Fils 
Aymon "  the  Rinaldo  of  Matteo  Boiardo — means 
simply  that  which  I  desire  here  to  study  :  the  meta- 
morphoses of  mediaeval  romance  stuffs,  and,  more 
especially,  the  vicissitudes  of  the  cycle  of  Charlemagne. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  271 

II. 

We  are  apt  to  think  of  the  Middle  Ages  as  if  Ihey 
were  the  companion-piece  to  Antiquity  ;  but  no  such 
ideal  correspondence  exists  between  the  two  periods. 
Antiquity  is  all  of  a  piece,  and  the  Middle  Ages,  on 
the  contrary,  are  heterogeneous  and  chaotic.  For 
Antiquity  is  the  steady  and  uniform  development  of 
civilization  in  one  direction  and  with  one  meaning  ; 
there  are  great  differences  between  its  various  epochs, 
but  they  are  as  the  differences  between  the  budding, 
the  blossoming,  and  the  fading  stages  of  one  plant : 
life  varies,  but  is  one.  The  Middle  Ages,  on  the 
other  hand,  are  a  series  of  false  starts,  of  interruptions 
and  of  new  departures;  a  perpetual  confusion.  For, 
if  we  think  over  them,  we  shall  see  that  these  centuries 
called  mediaeval  are  occupied  by  the  effort  of  one 
people,  or  one  generation,  to  put  to  rights  and  settle 
down  among  as  much  as  it  can  save  of  the  civilization 
of  Antiquity.  And  the  sudden  overwhelming  of  this 
people  or  this  generation  by  another,  which  puts  all 
the  elaborate  arrangements  into  disarray,  adds  to  the 
ruins  of  Antiquity  the  ruins  of  more  recent  times ;  and 
then  this  destroying  generation  tries  to  put  things 
straight,  to  settle  down,  and  is  in  its  turn  interrupted 
by  the  advent  of  some  new  comer  who  begins  the 
game  afresh. 

As  it  is  with  peoples,  so  also  is  it  with  ideas ; 
scarcely  has  a  scheme  of  life  or  of  philosophy  or  of  art 


272  EUPH  ORION. 

taken  shape  and  consistence  before,  from  out  of  the 
inexhaustible  chaos  of  mediaeval  thought  and  feeling, 
there  issue  new  necessities,  new  aspirations,  which  put 
into  confusion  all  previous  ones.  The  Middle  Ages 
were  like  some  financial  crisis  :  a  little  time,  a  little 
credit,  money  will  fructify,  wealth  will  reappear,  the 
difficult  moment  will  be  tided  over ;  and  so  with 
civilization.  But  unfortunately  the  wealth  of  ideas 
began  to  accumulate  in  the  storehouse  only  just  long 
enough  to  bring  down  a  rout  of  creditors,  people  who 
rifled  the  bank,  and  went  home  to  consume  or  invest 
their  money  in  order  to  be  succeeded  by  others. 
Hence,  in  the  matter  of  civilization,  the  Middle  Ages 
ended  in  an  extraordinary  slow  ruin,  a  bankruptcy 
like  that  which  overtook  France  before  '89,  and  from 
which,  as  France  was  restored  by  the  bold  seizure  and 
breaking  up  of  property  of  the  revolution,  the  world 
was  restored  by  the  bold  breaking  of  feudal  and 
spiritual  mortmain,  the  restoring  of  wasted  energies 
to  utility,  of  that  great  double  revolution,  the  Renais- 
sance and  the  Reformation.  Be  this  as  it  may, 
mankind  throughout  the  Middle  Ages  appears  to 
have  been  in  a  chronic  condition  of  packing  up  and 
unpacking,  and  packing  up  again  ;  one  after  another 
a  nation,  a  race,  a  philosophy,  a  political  system  came 
to  the  front  and  was  pushed  back  again  into  limbo : 
Germans  and  Kelts  and  Latins,  French  civilization 
of  the  day  of  Abelard,  Provencal  civilization  of  the 
days   of    the    Raymonds,   brilliant    and    evanescent 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  273 

Hohenstauffen  supremacy,  papacy  at  Canossa  and  at 
Avignon,  Templars  triumphant  and  Templars  per- 
secuted ;  scholasticism,  mysticism,  feudalism,  demo- 
cracy, communism  :  influences  all  these  perpetually 
rising  up  and  being  trodden  down,  till  they  all  rotted 
away  in  the  great  stagnation  of  the  fifteenth  century  ; 
and  only  in  one  part  of  the  world,  where  the  conflict  was 
more  speedily  ended,  where  one  set  of  tendencies  early 
triumphed,  where  stability  was  temporarily  obtained, 
in  Italy  alone  did  civilization  continue  to  be  nurtured 
and  developed  for  the  benefit  of  all  mankind.  In 
such  a  state  of  affairs  only  such  things  could  flourish 
and  mature  as  were  safe  from  what  I  have  called,  for 
want  of  a  better  expression,  the  perpetual  unpacking 
and  repacking,  the  perpetual  being  on  the  move,  of  the 
Middle  Ages  ;  and  among  such  things  foremost  was 
art,  the  essential  art  of  the  times,  architecture,  which, 
belonging  to  the  small  towns,  to  the  infinite  minority 
of  the  democracy,  who  worked  and  made  money  and 
let  the  great  changes  pass  over  their  heads,  thrived 
almost  as  something  too  insignificant  for  notice. 
But  it  was  different  with  literature.  Cathedrals  once 
built  cannot  so  easily  be  changed  ;  new  peoples,  new 
ideas,  must  accept  them.  But  poetry — the  thing  which 
every  nation  insists  upon  having  to  suit  its  own  taste, 
the  thing  which  every  nation  and  every  generation 
carries  about  with  it  hither  and  thither,  the  thing 
which  can  be  altered  to  suit  every  passing  whim — 
poetry  was,  of  all  the  fluctuating  things  of  the  Middle 
19 


274  EUPHORION. 

Ages,  perhaps  the  most  fluctuating  of  all.  And  fluctv- 
ating  also  because,  as  none  of  these  various  nations, 
tendencies,  aspirations,  dominated  sufficiently  long  to 
produce  any  highly  organized  art,  there  remained 
no  standard  works,  nothing  recognizedly  perfect, 
which  would  be  kept  for  its  perfection  and  gather 
round  it  imitations,  so  as  to  form  the  nucleus  of  any 
homogeneous  tradition.  The  Middle  Ages,  so  full  of 
fashions  in  literary  matters,  possessed  no  classics  ;  the 
minnesingers  knew  nothing  of  the  stern  old  Teutonic 
war  songs ;  the  meistersangers  had  forgotten  the 
minnesingers  ;  the  trouveres  and  troubadours  knew 
nothing  of  the  "  Chanson  de  Roland,"  and  Villon  knew 
nothing  of  them.  Only  in  Italy,  where  the  Middle 
Ages  came  to  an  end  and  the  Renaissance  began  with 
the  Lombard  league,  was  there  established  a  tradition 
of  excellence,  with  men  like  Dante,  Petrarch,  and  Boc- 
caccio, handed  down  from  generation  to  generation ; 
even  as,  while  in  the  north  there  came  about  the 
strange  modification  which  substituted  the  French  of 
Rabelais  for  the  French  of  Chrestien  de  Troyes,  the 
German  of  Luther  for  the  German  of  Wolfram  von 
Eschenbach,  the  Italian  language,  from  Ciullo  d'Al- 
camo  almost  to  Boiardo  and  Lorenzo  dei  Medici,  re- 
mained virtually  identical.  The  result  of  this,  which  I 
may  call  the  heterogeneousness  and  instability  of  the 
Middle  Ages, was  that  not  merely  literary  forms  were 
for  ever  arising  and  being  superseded,  but  literary 
subject  matter  was  continually  undergoing  a  process 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  275 

of  transformation.  While  in  Antiquity  the  great  epic 
and  tragic  stuffs  remained  well-nigh  unaltered,  and 
the  stories  of  Valerius  Flaccus  and  x\pollonius  Rhodius 
were  merely  the  stories  which  had  been  current  since 
the  days  of  Homer;  during  the  course  of  the  Middle 
Ages  every  epic  cycle,  and  every  tale  belonging 
thereunto,  was  gradually  adulterated,  mingled  with, 
swamped  by,  some  other  C3xle  or  tale,  nay,  rather, 
every  other  cycle  and  every  other  tale,  the  older  ones 
trying  to  save  their  popularity  by  admixture  with 
the  more  recent,  till  at  last  all  mythical  significance, 
all  historical  meaning,  all  national  character,  all 
psychological  reality,  were  lost  in  the  chaotic  result. 
And  meanwhile,  in  the  absence  of  any  stable  lan- 
guage, of  any  durable  literary  fashion,  the  Middle 
Ages  were  unable  to  give  to  these  epic  stuffs,  at  any 
one  period  of  their  life  of  metamorphose,  a  form 
sufficiently  artistically  valuable  to  secure  anything 
beyond  momentary  vogue,  to  secure  for  them  the 
immortality  of  the  great  Greek  tales  of  adventure  and 
warfare  and  love.  Thus  it  came  about  that  the  epic 
cycle  of  Charlemagne,  after  supplanting  in  men's 
minds  the  grand  sagas  of  the  pagan  North,  was  itself 
supplanted  by  the  Arthurian  cycle  ;  that  the  Prankish 
stories  absorbed  the  wholly  discrepant  elements  of 
their  more  fortunate  Keltic  rivals  ;  that  both  cycles, 
having  lost  all  character  through  fusion  and  through 
obliteration  by  time,  became  more  meaningless  gene- 
ration by  generation  and  year  by  year,  until  when  the 


276  E  UP  NORTON. 

Middle  Ages  had  come  to  an  end,  and  the  great  poets 
of  the  Renaissance  were  ready  to  give  this  old 
mediaeval  epic  stuff  a  definitive  and  durable  artistic 
shape,  there  came  to  the  hands  of  Boiardo  and 
Ariosto,  of  Tasso  and  Spenser,  only  a  strange,  trum- 
pery material,  muddled  by  jongleurs  and  romance 
writers,  and  reduced  to  mere  fairy  stuff,  taken  seriously 
only  by  Don  Quixote,  and  bythe  authors  of  the  volumes 
of  insane  twaddle  called  after  Amadis  of  Gaul  and 
all  his  kinsmen. 

Such  a  condition  of  perpetual  change  as  explains, 
in  my  belief,  why  the  mediaeval  epic  subjects  were 
wanted,  can  be  made  clear  only  by  examples.  I  shall 
therefore  try  to  show  the  transformations  which  were 
undergone  by  one  or  two  principal  mediaeval  epic 
subjects  as  a  result  of  a  mixture  with  other  epic  cycles; 
of  a  gradual  adaptation  to  a  new  state  of  civilization ; 
and  finally  of  their  gradual  separation  from  all  kind 
of  reality  and  real  interests. 

First  of  all,  let  us  look  at  the  epic  cycle,  which, 
although  known  to  us  only  in  poems  no  older  than 
those  of  the  trouveres  and  minnesingers  who  sang  of 
Charlemagne  and  Arthur,  is  in  leality  far  more 
ancient,  and  on  account  of  its  antiquity  and  its  conse- 
quent disconnection  with  mediaeval  religious  and 
political  interests,  was  thrown  aside  even  by  the 
nations  to  which  it  belonged,  by  the  Scandinavians 
who  took  to  writing  sagas  about  the  wars  of  Charle- 
magne against   Saracens,  and  by  the  Germans   who 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  277 

preferred  to  hear  the  adventures  of  Welsh  and  Breton 
Launcelots  and  Tristrams.  I  am  alluding  to  the 
stories  connected  with  the  family  and  life  of  the  hero 
called  Sigurd  by  the  Scandinavians,  and  Siegfried  by 
the  Germans.  Of  these  we  possess  a  Norse  version 
called  the  Volsunga  Saga,  magnificently  done  into 
English  by  Mr.  William  Morris;  which,  although 
written  down  at  the  end  of  the  twelfth  century,  in  the 
very  time  therefore  of  Chrestien  de  Troyes,  Wolfram 
von  Eschenbach,  and  Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  and 
subsequently  to  the  presumed  writing  of  the  "  Chanson 
de  Roland"  and  the  Nibelungenlied,  shows  us  in  reality 
the  product  of  a  people,  the  distant  Scandinavians  of 
Iceland,  who  were  five  or  six  hundred  years  behind 
the  French,  Germans,  and  English  of  the  twelfth  cen- 
tury. In  the  Volsunga  Saga,  neither  Christianity  nor 
feudalism  is  yet  dreamed  of ;  and  it  is  for  this  reason 
that  I  wish  to  compare  it  with  the  Nibelungenlied,  in 
order  to  show  how  enormously  the  old  epic  stuff  was 
altered  by  the  new  civilization.  The  whole  social  and 
moral  condition  of  the  two  versions  is  different.  In 
the  old  Scandinavian  civilization,  where  the  Viking  is 
surrounded  and  served  by  clansmen,  the  feeling  of 
blood  relationship  is  the  strongest  in  people's  hearts  ; 
strangely  and  fearfully  shown  in  the  introductory  tale 
of  Signy,  who,  in  order  to  avenge  her  father  Volsung, 
killed  by  her  husband,  goes  forth,  altered  in  face  by 
magic  arts,  to  the  woods  to  her  brother  Sigmund,  that, 


278  EUPHORION. 

unwittingly,  he  may  beget  with  her  the  only  man 
fit  to  avenge  the  Volsungs  ;  and  then  sends  the  boy 
Sinfjotli  to  the  man  he  has  hitherto  considered  merely 
as  his  uncle,  bidding  the  latter  kill  him  if  he  prove 
unworthy  of  his  incestuous  birth,  or  train  him  to 
\-engeance.  The  three  together  murder  the  husband 
and  legitimate  children  of  Signy,  and  set  the  palace 
on  fire  ;  which,  being  done,  the  queen,  having  accom- 
plished her  duty  to  her  kin,  accomplishes  that  towards 
her  husband,  and  calmly  returns  to  die  in  the  burning 
hall.  Here  (and  apparentl}-  again  in  the  case  of  the 
children  of  Sigurd  and  Brynhilt)  incest  becomes  a 
family  virtue.  This  being  the  frightful  preponderance 
of  the  feeling  of  blood  relationship,  it  is  quite  natural 
that  the  Scandinavian  Chriemhilt  (called  in  the  Vol- 
sunga  Saga,  Gudrun)  should  not  resent  the  murder 
of  her  husband  Siegfried  or  Sigurd  by  her  brothers  at 
the  instigation  of  the  jealous  Brynhilt  (who  has  in  a 
manner  been  Sigurd's  wife  before  he  made  her  over  to 
Chriemhilt's  eldest  brother)  ;  and  that,  so  far  from 
seeking  anyrevenge  against  them,she  should,  when  her 
second  husband  Atli  sends  for  her  brothers  in  order  to 
rob  and  murder  them,  first  vainly  warn  them  of  the 
plot,  and  then,  when  they  have  been  massacred,  kill 
Atli  and  her  children  by  him  in  order  to  avenge  her 
brothers.  The  slackening  of  the  tribal  feeling,  the  idea 
of  fidelity  in  love  and  sanctity  of  marriage  belonging 
to  Christianity  and  feudalism,  rendered  such  a  story 
unintellig-ible    to    the    Germans   of    the    Othos    and 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  279 

Henrys,  In  the  Nibelungenlied,  the  whole  story  of 
the  massacre  of  the  brothers  is  changed.  Chriemhilt 
never  forgives  the  murder  of  Siegfried,  and  it  is  not 
Etzel  =  Atli  for  the  sake  of  plunder,  but  she  herself 
for  the  sake  of  revenge,  who  decoys  her  brothers  and 
murders  them  ;  it  is  she  who  with  her  own  hand  cuts 
off  the  head  of  Gunther  to  expiate  his  murder  of  Sieg- 
fried. To  our  feelings,  more  akin  to  those  of  the  feudal 
Christians  of  Franconia  than  to  those  of  the  tribal 
Scandinavians  of  the  Edda,  the  second  version  is  far 
more  intelligible  and  interesting — the  story  of  this 
once  gentle  and  loving  Chriemhilt,  turned  by  the 
murder  of  her  beloved  into  a  fury,  and  plotting  to 
avenge  his  death  by  the  death  of  all  her  kinsfolk,, 
must  be  much  grander  and  more  pathetic  than  the 
story  of  this  strange  Gudrun,  who  sits  down  patiently 
beneath  the  injury  done  to  her  by  her  brothers,  but 
savagely  avenges  them  on  her  new  husband,  and  her 
own  and  his  innocent  children  ;  to  us  this  persistence 
of  tribal  feeling,  destroying  all  indignation  and  love,  is 
merely  unnatural,  confusing,  and  repulsive.  But  this 
alteration  for  the  better  in  one  of  the  incidents  of 
the  tale  is  a  mere  fluke  ;  and  the  whole  main  plot  of 
the  originally  central  figures  are  completely  obliterated 
by  the  new  state  of  civilization,  and  rendered  merely 
trivial  and  grotesque.  In  the  Volsunga  Saga  Sigurd, 
overcome  by  enchantments,  has  forgotten  his  wife  (or 
mistress,  a  vague  mythical  relationship)  ;  and,  with  all 
sense  of  the  past  obliterated,  has  made  her  over  to  the 


28o  EUPHORION. 

brother  of  his  new  wife  Gudrun  ;  and  Brynhilt  kills 
her  faithless  love  to  dissolve  the  second  marriage  and 
be  reunited  with  him  in  death.  In  the  Nibelungen- 
lied  Siegfried,  although  the  flower  of  knighthood,  con- 
quers by  foul  play  the  Amazon  Brunhilt  to  reward 
Gunther  for  the  hand  of  his  sister  ;  nay,  in  a  comic 
and  loathsome  scene  he  forces  her  into  the  embraces 
of  the  craven  Gunther  ;  and  then  he  gets  killed  by 
Brunhilt's  machinations  ;  when,  after  most  unqueenly 
bickerings,  the  proud  Amazon  is  brutally  told  by 
Siegfried's  wife  of  the  dirty  trick  which  has  given 
her  to  Gunther.  After  this,  it  is  impossible  to  realize, 
when  Siegfried  is  murdered  and  all  our  sympathies 
called  on  to  his  side,  the  utterly  out-of-character, 
blackguardly  behaviour  which  has  brought  the  hero 
to  his  death.  Similarly  the  conception  of  the  charac- 
ter and  position  of  Brynhilt  is  entirely  disfigured  and 
rendered  inane  in  the  Nibelungenlied  :  of  that  superb 
dem  i-goddess  of  the  Scandinavians,  burnt  on  the  pyre 
with  her  falcons  and  dogs  and  horses  and  slaves,  by 
the  side  of  the  demi-god  Sigurd,  whom  she  has  loved 
and  killed,  lest  the  door  of  Valhalla,  swinging  after 
him,  should  shut  her  out  from  his  presence  ;  of  her 
there  remains  in  the  German  mediaeval  poem  only 
a  virago  (more  like  the  giantesses  of  the  Amadis 
romances)  enraged  at  having  been  defeated  and  gro- 
tesquely and  grossly  pummelled  into  wedlock  by  a 
man  not  her  husband,  and  then  slanged  like  a  fishwife 
by  her  envious  sister-in-law. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  281 

The  old,  consistent,  grandly  tragic  tale  of  the  mys- 
terious incests  and  revenges  of  a  race  of  demi-gods  has 
lost  its  sense,  its  point  in  the  attempt  to  arrange  it  to 
suit  Christian  and  feudal  ideas.  The  really  fine  por- 
tions of  the  Nibelungenlied  are  exactly  those  which 
have  no  real  connection  with  the  original  story, 
gratuitous  additions  by  mediaeval  poets  :  the  deli- 
cately indicated  falling  in  love  of  Siegfried  and 
Chriemhilt,  the  struggles  of  Markgraf  Riidger  be- 
tween obedience  to  his  feudal  superior  and  fidelity 
towards  his  friends  and  guests  ;  and,  above  all,  the 
canto  of  the  death  of  Siegfried.  This  last  is  different, 
intensely  different,  from  the  rugged  and  dreary 
monotony  of  the  rest  ;  this  most  poetical,  almost 
Spenserian  or  Ariostesque  realization  of  the  scene  ; 
this  beautiful  picture  (though  worked  with  the  needle 
of  the  arras-worker  rather  than  with  pencil  or  brush) 
of  the  wood,  the  hunt,  the  solitary  fountain  in  the 
Odenwald,  where,  with  his  spear  propped  against  the 
lime-tree,  Siegfried  was  struck  down  into  the  clover 
and  flowers,  and  writhed  with  Hagen's  steel  through 
his  back.  This  canto  is  certainly  interpolated  by 
some  first-rate  poet,  at  least  a  Gottfried  or  a  Walther, 
to  whom  that  passage  of  the  savage  old  droning  song  of 
death  had  suggested  a  piece  of  new  art ;  it  is  like  the 
fragments  of  exquisitely  chiselled  leafage  and  figures 
which  you  sometimes  find  encrusted — by  whom  ?  where- 
fore?— quite  isolated  in  fhe  midst  of  the  rough  and 
lichen-stained  stones  of  some  rude  Norman  or  Lombard 


282  EUPHORION. 

church.  All  the  rest  of  the  Nibelungenlied  gives  an 
impression  of  effeteness  ;  there  is  no  dcfiniteness  of 
idea  such  as  that  of  the  Volsunga  Saga  ;  the  battles 
are  mere  vague  slaughter,  no  action,  no  realized  move- 
ment, or  (excepting  Rudger)  no  realized  motive  of 
conduct.  Shape  and  colour  would  seem  to  have 
been  obliterated  by  repetition  and  alteration.  Yet 
even  these  alterations  could  not  make  the  tale  of  Sieg- 
fried survive  among  the  Germans  of  the  Middle  Ages ; 
nay,  the  more  the  alterations  the  less  the  interest; 
the  want  of  consistency  and  colour  due  to  rearrange- 
ment merely  accelerated  the  throwing  aside  of  a  sub- 
ject which,  dating  from  pagan  and  tribal  times,  had 
become  repugnant  to  the  new  generations.  All  the 
mutilations  in  the  world  could  not  make  the  old 
Scandinavian  tales  of  betrayed  trust,  of  revenge  and 
triumphant  bloodshed,  at  all  sympathetic  to  men 
whose  religious  and  social  ideals  were  those  of  for- 
giveness and  fidelity  ;  even  stripped  of  its  incestuous 
mysteries  and  of  its  fearful  tribal  love,  the  tale  of 
Sigurd  and  Brynhilt,  reduced  to  the  tale  of  Chriemhilt's 
revenge,  was  unpalatable  :  no  more  attempts  were 
made  at  re-writing  it,  and  the  poems  of  W'alther,  of 
Gottfried,  of  Wolfram,  of  Ulrich,  and  of  Tannhauser, 
full  as  they  are  of  references  to  stories  of  the  Caro- 
lingian  and  Arthurian  cycles,  na\-,  to  Antique  and 
Oriental  tales,  contain  no  allusion  to  the  personages  of 
the  Nibelungenlied.  The  old  epic  of  the  Gothic  races 
had  been  pushed  aside  by  the  triumphant  epic  of  the 
obscure  and  conquered  Kclt^. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  283 

Tliere  are  few  phenomena  in  the  history  of  ideas 
and  forms  more  singular  than  that  of  the  sudden 
conquest  of  the  poetry  of  dominant  or  distant  nations 
by  the  poetic  subjects  of  a  comparatively  small  race, 
sheared  of  all  political  importance,  restricted  to  a 
trifling  territory,  and  well-nigh  deprived  of  their 
language  ;  and  of  this  there  can  be  found  no  more 
striking  example  than  the  sudden  ousting  of  the 
Carolingian  epic  by  the  cycle  of  Arthur. 

The  Kelts  of  Britain  and  Ireland  possessed  an  epic 
cycle  of  their  own,  which  came  to  notice  only  when 
they  v/ere  dispossessed  of  their  last  strongholds  by 
Saxons  and  Normans,  and  which  immediately  spread 
with  astounding  rapidity  all  over  Europe,  The  van- 
quished race  became  fashionable  ;  themselves,  their 
art  and  their  poetry,  began  to  be  sought  for  as  a 
war-enhanced  loot.  The  heroic  tales  of  the  Kelts 
were  transcribed  in  Welsh,  and  translated  into  Latin, 
by  order  of  the  Norman  and  Angevine  kings,  glad, 
it  would  seem,  to  oppose  the  old  Briton  to  the  Saxon 
element.  The  Keltic  songs  were  carried  all  over 
France  by  Breton  bards,  to  whose  music  and  rhymes, 
with  only  a  general  idea  of  the  subjects,  the  neo- 
Latin-speaking  Franks  listened  with  the  sort  of 
stolid  satisfaction  with  which  English  or  Germans  of 
a  hundred  years  ago  listened  to  Italians  singing 
Metastasio's  verses.  But  soon  the  songs  and  tales 
were  translated  ;  and  French  poets  imitated  in  their 
language,  northern  and  southern,  the  graceful  metres 


J!  84  E  UP  H  ORION. 

of  the  Keltic  lays,  and  altered  and  arranged  their 
subjects.  So  that,  in  a  very  short  time,  France,  and 
through  it  Germany,  was  inundated  with  Keltic  stories. 
This  triumph  of  the  vanquished  race  was  not  without 
reason.  The  Kelts,  early  civilized  by  Rome  and 
Christianity,  had  a  set  of  stories  and  a  set  of  heroes 
extremely  in  accordance  with  mediaeval  ideas,  and 
requiring  but  very  little  alteration.  The  considerable 
age  of  their  civilization  had  long  obliterated  all  traces 
of  pagan  and  tribal  feeling  in  their  tales.  Their 
heroes,  originally,  like  those  of  all  other  people, 
divinities  intimately  connected  with  natural  pheno- 
mena, had  long  lost  all  cosmic  characteristics,  long 
ceased  to  be  gods,  and,  manipulated  by  the  fancy  of  a 
race  whose  greatness  was  quite  a  thing  of  the  past, 
had  become  a  sort  of  golden  age  ideals — the  men  of  a 
distant  period  of  glory,  which  was  adorned  with  every 
kind  of  perfection,  till  it  became  as  unreal  as  fairy- 
land. Fairyland,  in  good  sooth,  was  this  country  of 
the  Keltic  tales  ;  and  there  is  a  sort  of  symbolical 
significance  in  the  fact  of  its  lawgiver  Merlin,  and  its 
emperor  Arthur,  being  both  of  them  not  dead,  like 
Sigurd,  like  Dietrich,  like  Charlemagne  and  Roland, 
but  lying  in  enchanted  sleep.  Long  inaction  and  the 
day-dreaming  of  idleness  had  refined  and  idealized  the 
heroes  of  this  Keltic  race — a  race  of  brilliant  fancy  and 
almost  southern  mobility,  and  softened  for  a  long  time 
by  contact  with  Roman  colonists  and  Christian  priests. 
They  were  not  the  brutal  combatants  of  an   active 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  285 

fighting  age,  like  the  heroes  of  the  Edda  and  of  the 
Carolingian  cycles  ;  nor  had  they  any  particular  mili- 
tary work  to  do,  belonging  as  they  did  to  a  people 
huddled  away  into  inactivity.  Their  sole  occupation 
was  to  extend  abroad  that  ideal  happiness  which 
reigned  in  the  ideal  court  of  Arthur  ;  to  go  forth  on  the 
loose  and  see  what  ill-conditioned  folk  there  might 
yet  be  who  required  being  subdued  or  taught  manners 
in  the  happy  kingdom  which  the  poor  insignificant 
Kelts  connected  with  some  princelet  of  theirs  who 
centuries  before  may  have  momentarily  repelled  the 
pagan  Saxons.  Hence  in  the  Keltic  stories,  such  as 
they  exist  in  the  versions  previous  to  the  conquest  by 
the  Norman  kings,  and  previous  also  to  any  commu- 
nications with  other  peoples,  the  distinct  beginning 
of  what  was  later  to  be  called  knight-errantry  ;  of 
heroes,  creations  of  an  inactive  nation,  having  no 
special  military  duties,  going  forth  to  do  what  good 
they  may  at  random,  unforced  by  any  necessity,  and 
following  a  mere  sesthetico-romantic  plan  of  perfecting 
themselves  by  deeds  of  valour  to  become  more  worthy 
of  their  God,  their  King,  and  their  Lady  :  religion, 
loyalty,  and  love,  all  three  of  them  mere  aesthetic 
abstractions,  becoming  the  goal  of  an  essentially 
aesthetic,  unpractical  system  of  self-improvement,  such 
as  was  utterly  incompatible  with  any  real  and  serious 
business  in  life.  Idle  poetic  fancies  of  an  inert  people, 
the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table  have  no  mission  save 
that  of  being  poetically  perfect.     Such  was  the  spirit 


3  86  EUPHORION. 

of  Keltic  poetry ;  and,  as  it  happened,  this  spirit 
satisfied  the  imaginative  wants  of  mediaeval  society 
just  at  the  moment  when  political  events  diffused 
in  other  countries  the  knowledge  of  the  Arthurian 
legends.  The  old  Teutonic  tales  of  Sigurd,  Gudrun, 
and  Dietrich,  had  long  ceased  to  appeal,  in  their 
mutilated  and  obliterated  condition,  to  a  society  to 
whom  tribal  feeling  and  pagan  heroism  were  odious, 
and  whose  religion  distinctly  reproved  revenge.  These 
semi-mythological  tales  had  been  replaced  by  another 
cycle :  the  purely  realistic  epic,  which  had  arisen 
during  the  struggles  between  the  Christian  west 
against  the  pagan  north-east  and  the  Mohammedan 
south,  and  which,  originating  in  the  short  battle-songs 
narrating  the  exploits  of  the  predecessors  and  help- 
mates of  Charlemagne,  had  constituted  itself  into  large 
narratives  of  which  the  "  Song  of  Roland  "  represents 
the  artistic  culmination.  These  narratives  of  mere 
military  exploits,  of  the  battles  of  a  strong  feudal  aris- 
tocracy animated  by  feudal  loyalty  and  half-religious, 
half-patriotic  fury  against  invading  heathenness,  had 
perfectly  satisfied  the  men  of  the  earliest  Middle  Ages, 
of  the  times  when  feudalism  was  being  established  and 
the  church  being  reformed  ;  when  the  strong  military 
princelets  of  the  North  were  embarking  with  their 
barons  to  conquer  new  kingdoms  in  England  and  in 
Italy  and  Greece  ;  when  the  whole  of  feudal  Europe 
hurled  itself  against  Asia  in  the  first  Crusades.  But 
the    condition    of    things   soon    altered  :    the   feudal 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  267 

hierarchy  was  broken  up  into  a  number  of  semi-in- 
dependent little  kingdoms  or  principalities,  struggling, 
with  the  assistance  of  industrial  and  mercantile  classes, 
to  become  absolute  monarchies  ;  princes  who  had  been 
mere  generals  became  stay-at-home  diplomatists, 
studious  of  taxation  and  intrigue,  surrounded  no 
longer  by  armed  vassals,  but  by  an  essentially  urban 
court,  in  constant  communication  with  the  money- 
making  burghers.  Religion,  also,  instead  of  being  a 
matter  of  fighting  with  infidel  invaders,  turned  to  fan- 
tastic sectarianism  and  emotional  mysticism.  With 
the  sense  of  futility,  of  disappointment,  attendant  on 
the  later  Crusades,  came  also  a  habit  of  roaming  in 
strange  countries,  of  isolated  adventure  in  search  of 
wealth  or  information,  a  love  of  the  distant,  the  half- 
understood,  the  equivocal  ;  perhaps  even  a  hankering 
after  a  mysterious  compromise  between  the  religion  of 
Europe  and  the  religions  of  the  East,  such  as  appears 
to  have  existed  among  the  Templars  and  other  Franks 
settled  in  Asia. 

There  was,  throughout  feudal  society,  a  sort  of 
languor,  a  morbid  longing  for  something  new,  now 
that  the  old  had  ceased  to  be  possible  or  had 
proved  futile  ;  after  the  great  excitement  of  the  Cru- 
sades it  was  impossible  to  be  either  sedately  idle  or 
quietly  active,  even  as  it  is  with  all  of  us  during  the 
days  of  weariness  and  restlessness  after  some  long 
journey.  To  such  a  society  the  strongly  realistic 
Carolingian  epic  had  ceased  to  appeal :  the  tales  of 


288  EUPHORION. 

the  Welsh  and  Breton  bards,  repeated  by  trouvere 
and  jongleur,  troubadour  and  minnesinger,  came  as  a 
revelation.  The  fatigued,  disappointed,  morbid,  ima- 
ginative society  of  the  later  Crusades  recognized  in 
this  fairyland  epic  of  a  long  refined,  long  idle,  na}', 
effete  race,  the  realization  of  their  own  ideal  :  of 
activity  unhampered  b}^  aim  or  organization,  of  senti- 
ment and  emotion  and  action  quite  useless  and  un- 
necessary, purely  subservient  to  imaginative  gratifica- 
tion. These  Arthurs,  Launcelots,  Tristrams,  Kays,, 
and  Gawains,  fantastic  phantoms,  were  also  far  more 
artistically  malleable  than  the  iron  Rolands,  Olivers,, 
and  Renauds  of  earlier  days  ;  that  unknown  kingdom, 
of  Britain  could  much  more  easily  be  made  the  im- 
possible ideal,  in  longing  for  which  squeamish  and 
lazy  minds  might  refuse  all  coarser  reality.  Moreover,, 
those  who  listened  to  the  tales  of  chivalry  were 
different  from  those  who  had  listened  to  the  Caro- 
lingian  stories  ;  and,  therefore,  required  something 
different.  They  were  courtiers,  and  one  half  of  them 
were  women.  Now  the  Carolingian  tales,  originally 
battle-songs,  sung  in  camps  and  castles  to  mere 
soldiers,  had  at  first  possessed  no  female  characters 
at  all  ;  and  when  gradually  they  were  introduced,  it 
was  in  the  coarsest  barrack  or  tap-room  style.  The 
Keltic  tales,  on  the  contrary,  whether  from  national 
tradition,  or  rather  from  longer  familiarity  with  Chris- 
tian culture  and  greater  idleness  of  life,  naturally 
made  women  and  women's  love  the  goal  of  a  great 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  2S9 

many  adventures  which  an  effete  nation  could  no 
longer  ascribe  to  patriotic  movements.  But  this  was 
not  all.  The  religious  feeling  of  the  day  was  ex- 
tremely inclined  to  mysticism,  in  which  aesthetic, 
erotic,  and  all  kinds  of  morbid  and  ill-defined  tenden- 
cies were  united,  which  was  more  than  anything  else 
tinged  with  a  semi-Asiatic  quietism,  a  longing  for  the 
passive  ecstasy  of  Nirvana.  This  religious  side  of 
mediaeval  life  was  also  gratified  by  the  Arthurian 
romances.  Oddly  enough,  there  existed  an  old  Welsh 
or  Breton  tale  about  the  boy  Peredur,  who  from  a 
complete  simpleton  became  the  prince  of  chivalry.. 
and  his  many  adventures  connected  with  a  certain 
mysterious  blood-dripping  lance,  and  a  still  more 
mysterious  basin  or  grail  (an  allusion  to  which  is  said 
by  M.  de  la  Villemarque  to  be  contained  in  the  origi- 
nally Keltic  name  of  Percival),  which  possessed  magic 
properties  akin  to  those  of  the  purse  of  Fortunatus, 
or  the  pipkin  in  the  story  of  "  Little  pot,  boil  !  "  The 
story,  whose  original  mythical  meaning  had  been  lost 
in  the  several  centuries  of  Christianity,  was  very 
decayed  and  obscure  ;  and  the  fact  of  the  blood  on 
the  lance  being  that  of  a  murdered  kinsman  of  Pere- 
dur, and  of  the  basin  containing  the  head  of  the  same 
person  cut  off"  by  Gloucester  witches,  was  evidently 
insufficient  to  account  for  all  the  mystery  with  which 
these  objects  were  surrounded.  The  French  poets  of 
the  Middle  Ages,  strongly  imbued  with  Oriental  legends 
brought  back  by  the  Crusaders,  saw  at  a  glance  the 

2Q 


290  EUPHORION. 

meaning  of  the  whole  story :  the  lance  was  the  lance 
with  which  Longinus  had  pierced  the  Saviour's  side ; 
the  Grail  was  the  cup  which  had  received  His  blood, 
nay,  it  was  the  cup  of  the  Last  Supper.  A  tale  about 
the  preservation  of  these  precious  relics  by  Joseph  of 
Arimathaea,  was  immediately  connected  therewith  ;  a 
theory  was  set  up  (doubtless  with  the  aid  of  quite  un- 
christian, Oriental  legends)  of  a  kind  of  kingdom  of 
the  keepers  of  the  Grail,  of  a  vague  half-material,  half- 
spiritual  state  of  bliss  connected  with  the  service  of 
the  Grail,  which  fed  its  knights  (and  here  the  Templars 
and  their  semi-oriental  mysteries,  for  which  they  were 
later  so  frightfully  misused,  certainly  come  into  play) 
with  food  which  is  at  once  of  the  body  and  of  the  soul. 
Thus  the  Keltic  Peredur,  bent  upon  massacring  the 
Gloucester  witches  to  avenge  his  uncle,  was  turned 
into  a  saintly  knight,  seeking  throughout  a  more  and 
more  perfect  life  for  the  kingdom  of  the  Grail :  the 
Perceval  of  Chrestien  de  Troyes,  the  Parzifal  of 
Wolfram  von  Eschenbach,  whom  later  romance 
writers  (wishing  to  connect  everything  more  closely 
with  Arthur's  court)  replaced  by  the  Sir  Galahad  of 
the  "Morte  d'Arthur,"  while  the  guest  of  the  Grail 
became  a  sort  of  general  mission  of  several  knights, 
a  sort  of  spiritual  crusade  to  whose  successful  cham- 
pions Percival,  Bors,  and  Galahad,  the  Middle  Ages 
did  not  hesitate  to  add  the  arch-adulterer  Launcelot. 

Thus  did  the  Arthurian  tales  answer  the  require- 
ments  of  the  languid,  dreamy,  courtly,  lady-serving 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  291 

and  religiously  mystic  sons  and  grandsons  of  those 
earlier  Crusaders  whose  aspirations  had  been  expressed 
by  the  rough  and  solemn  heroes  of  Carolingian  tales. 
The  Carolingian  tales  were  thrown  aside,  or  were  kept 
by  the  noble  mediaeval  poets  only  on  condition  of 
their  original  meaning  being  completely  defaced  by 
wholesale  admixture  of  the  manners  and  adventures 
belonging  to  the  Arthurian  cycles.  The  paladins 
were  forced  to  disport  themselves  in  the  same  fairy- 
land as  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table  ;  and  many 
mediseval  poems  the  heroes  of  which,  like  Ogier  of 
Denmark  and  Huon  of  Bordeaux,  already  existed  in 
the  Carolingian  tales,  are  in  reality,  with  their  romantic 
loves,  their  useless  adventures,  their  Morgana's  castles 
and  Oberon's  horns,  offshoots  of  the  Keltic  stories, 
which  were  as  rich  in  every  kind  of  supernatural 
(being,  in  fact,  pagan  m^yths  turned  into  fairy  tales) 
as  the  genuine  Carolingian  subjects,  whose  origin  was 
entirely  historical,  were  completely  devoid  of  such 
things.  Arthur  and  his  ladies  and  knights  :  Guenevere, 
Elaine,  Enid,Yseult,  Launcelot,  Geraint,  Kay,  Gawain, 
Tristram,  and  Percival-Galahad,  were  the  real  heroes 
and  heroines  of  the  courtly  nobles  and  the  courtly 
poets  of  this  second  phase  of  mediaeval  life.  The 
Teuton  Charlemagne,  Roland  and  Oliver  were  as 
completely  forgotten  of  the  poets  who  met  in  that 
memorable  combat  of  the  Wartburg,  as  were  the 
Teuton  Sigurd  and  Dietrich.  And  if  the  Carolingian 
cycle  survived,  however  much  altered,  I  think  it  must 


292  EUPHORION. 

have  been  thanks  to  the  burghers  and  artizans  of  the 
Netherlands  and  of  Provence,  to  whom  the  bluff, 
matter-of-fact  heroism,  the  simple,  gross,  but  not  ille- 
gitimate amours  of  Carolingian  heroes,  were  more 
satisfactory  than  any  mystic  quest  of  the  Grail,  any 
refined  adultery  of  Guenevere  or  Yseult. 

But  the  inevitable  fate  of  all  mediaeval  epics  awaited 
this  triumphant  Arthurian  cycle:  the  fate  of  being  ob- 
literated by  passing  from  one  nation  and  civilization 
to  another,  long  before  the  existence  of  any  poetic  art 
adequate  to  its  treatment.  Of  this  I  will  take  as  an 
example  one  of  the  mediaeval  poems  which  has  the 
greatest  reputation,  the  masterpiece  (according  to  most 
critics,  with  whom  I  find  it  difficult,  in  the  presence 
of  a  poet  like  Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  to  agree)  of 
probably  the  most  really  poetical  and  earnest  school  of 
poetry  which  the  pre-Dantesque  Middle  Ages  pos- 
sessed— the  "  Parzifal  "  of  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach. 

The  paramount  impression  (I  cannot  say  the 
strongest,  for  strong  impressions  are  incompatible 
with  such  work  as  this)  left  by  the  masterpiece  of 
Wolfram  von  Eschenbach,  is  that  of  the  most  aston- 
ishing vagueness,  fluidity,  haziness,  vaporousness.  In 
reading  it  one  looks  back  to  that  rudely  hewn  and 
extremely  obliterated  Nibelungenlied,  as  to  something 
quite  astonishingly  clear,  detailed  and  strongly  marked 
as  to  something  distinctly  artistic.  Indeed  by  the 
side  of  "  Parzifal  "  everything  seems  artistic  ;  Hart- 
mann  von  Auc   reads    like  Chaucer,  "Aucassin    et 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  293 

Nicolette"  is  as  living  as  "Cymbeline,"  "  Chevy  Chase" 
seems  as  good  as  the  battles  of  Homer.     It  is  not  a 
narrative,  but  a  vague  mooning;  a  knight   illiterate, 
not  merely  like    his  fellow  minnesingers,  in   the  way 
of  reading  and  writing,  but  in  the  sense  of  complete 
absence  of  all  habit  of  literary  form  ;  extremely  noble 
and  pure  of  mind,  chaste,  gentle,  with  a  funny,  puzzled 
sense  of  humour,   reminding  one  distantly  of  Jean 
Paul  in  his  drowsy  moments  ;  a  hanger-on  of  courts, 
but  perfectly  simple-hearted  and  childlike  ;  very  poor 
and    easily  pleased  :  such  is,  for  good   and   for  bad, 
Herr  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach,  the  only  real  person- 
ality in  his  poem.     And  he  narrates,  in  a    mooning, 
digressive,  good-natured,  drowsy  tone,  with  only  a  rare 
awaking  of  interest,  a  story  which  he  has  heard  from 
some  one  else,  and  that  some  one  else  from  a  series 
of  other    some   one   elses    (Chrestien    de   Troyes,   a 
legendary  Provengal  Chiot  or  Guyot,  perhaps  even 
th'^e  original  Welsh  bard)  ;  all  muddled,  monotonous, 
and  droning  ;  events  and  persons  ill-defined,  without 
any  sense    of  the   relative   importance    of  anything, 
without  clear  perception  of  what  it  is  all  about,  or  at 
least  without  the  power  of  keeping  the  matter  straight 
before  the  reader.     A  story,  in  point  of  fact,  which  is 
no  story  at  all,  but  a  mere  series  of  rambling  adven- 
tures (adventures  which  are  scarcely  adventures,  having 
no  point  or  plot)  of  various  people  with  not  much 
connection  and  no  individuality— Gachmuret,  Parzifal, 
Gawain,  Loherangrein,Anfortas,  Feirefis— pale  ghosts 


294  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

of  beings,  moving  in  a  country  of  Kennaqvvhere, 
Aquitaine,  Anjou,  Brittany,  Wales,  Spain,  and  heaven 
knows  what  wondrous  Oriental  places ;  a  misty  coun- 
try with  woods  and  towns  and  castles  which  are  in- 
finitely far  apart  and  yet  quite  near  each  other;  which 
seem  to  sail  about  like  cloud  castles  round  the  only  solid 
place  in  the  book,  Plimizol,  where  Arthur's  court, 
with  round  table  constantly  spread,  is  for  ever  estab- 
lished. A  no  place,  nowhere  ;  yet  full  of  details  : 
minute  inventories  of  the  splendid  furniture  of  castles 
(castles  where  ?  how  reached  ?)  ;  infinitely  inferior  in 
this  matter  even  to  the  Nibelungenlied,  where  you  are 
made  to  feel  so  vividly  (one  of  the  ie\Y  modern  and 
therefore  clear  things  therein)  the  long,  dreary  road 
from  Worms  to  Bechlarn,  and  thence  to  Etzelburg, 
though  of  none  of  them  is  there  anything  beyond  a 
name.  For  the  Nibelungen  story  had  been  localized 
in  what  to  narrator  and  audience  was  a  reality,  the 
country  in  which  themselves  lived,  where  themselves 
might  seek  out  the  abbey  in  which  Siegfried  was 
buried,  the  well  in  the  Odenwald  near  which  he  was 
stabbed  ;  where  they  knew  from  merchant  and  pilgrim 
the  road  taken  by  the  Nibelungs  from  Santen  to 
Worms,  by  the  Burgundians  from  Worms  to  Hungary. 
But  here  in  "  Parzifal "  we  are  in  a  mere  vague  world 
of  anywhere,  the  world  of  Keltic  and  Oriental  romance 
become  mere  cloudland  to  the  Thuringian  knight. 
And  similarly  have  the  heroes  of  other  nations,  the 
Arthurs,  Gawains,  Gachmurets,  of  Wales  and  Anjou, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  295, 

become  mere  vague  names  ;  they  have  become  liqui- 
fied, lost  all  shape  and  local  habitation.  They  are 
mere  names,  these  ladies  and  knights  of  Herr  Wolfram, 
names  with  fair  pink  and  white  faces,  names  magnifi- 
cently draped  in  bejewelled  Oriental  stuffs  and  em- 
bossed armour  ;  they  have  no  home,  no  work,  nothing 
to  do.  This  is  the  most  remarkable  characteristic  of 
"  Parzifal,"  and  what  makes  it  so  typical  of  the  process 
of  growing  inane  through  overmuch  alteration,  which 
prevented  the  mediaeval  epics  ever  turning  into  an 
Iliad  or  an  Odyssey  ;  this  that  it  is  essentially  idle 
and  all  about  nothing.  The  feudal  relations  strongly 
marked  in  the  German  Nibelungenlied  have  melted 
away  like  the  distinctions  of  race  :  every  knight  is 
independent,  not  a  vassal  nor  a  captain,  a  Volker  or 
Hagen,  or  Roland  or  Renaud  followed  by  his  men  ; 
but  an  isolated  individual,  without  even  a  squire, 
wandering  about  alone  through  this  hazy  land  of 
nowhere.  Knight-errantry,  in  the  time  of  the  great 
Guelph  and  Ghibelline  struggles,  every  bit  as  ideal  as 
that  of  Spenser  or  Cervantes ;  and  with  the  difference 
that  Sir  Calidore  and  Sir  Artegal  have  an  appointed 
task,  some  Blatant  Beast  or  other  nuisance  to  over- 
come ;  and  that  Don  Quixote  has  the  general  rescuing 
of  all  the  oppressed  Princesse  Micomiconas,  and  the 
destruction  of  all  windmills,  and  the  capturing  of  all 
helmets  of  Mambrino,  and  the  establishing  all  over 
the  world  of  the  worship  of  Dulcinea.  But  these 
knights  of  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach  have  no  more 


296  EUPHORION. 

this  mission  than  they  have  the  politico-military 
missions  of  a  Riidger  or  a  Roland.  They  are  all 
riding  about  at  ramdom,  without  any  particular 
pagans,  necromancers,  or  dragons  to  pursue.  The  very 
service  of  the  Holy  Grail,  which  is  the  main  interest 
of  the  poem,  consists  in  nothing  apparently  except 
living  virtuously  at  the  Castle  of  Montselvasche,  and 
virtuously  eating  and  drinking  the  victuals  provided 
miraculously.  To  be  admitted  to  this  service,  no 
initiation,  no  mission,  nothing  preliminary  seems 
required.  Parzifal  himself  merely  wanders  about 
vaguely,  without  doing  any  specified  thing.  The  fact 
is  that  in  this  poem  all  has  become  purely  ideal ;  ideal 
to  the  point  of  utter  vacuity  :  there  is  no  connection 
with  any  human  business.  Of  all  the  heroes  and 
heroines  we  hear  that  they  are  perfectly  chaste,  truth- 
ful, upright ;  and  they  are  never  put  into  any  situation 
to  test  these  qualities  :  they  are  never  placed  in  the 
way  of  temptation,  never  made  to  fight  with  evil,  or 
to  decide  between  it  and  good.  The  very  religion  of 
the  Holy  Grail  consists  in  doing  nothing :  not  a  word 
about  relieving  the  poor  or  oppressed,  of  tending  the 
sick,  of  delivering  the  Holy  Sepulchre,  of  defending 
that  great  injured  One,  Christ.  To  be  Grail  Knight 
or  even  Grail  King  means  to  be  exactly  the  same  as 
before.  Where  in  this  vague  dreamland  of  passive 
purity  and  heroism,  of  untempted  chastity  and  untried 
honour,  where  are  the  earthly  trials  of  Tristram,  of 
Guenevere,  of  Riidger,  of  Renaud  .'    Where  the  moral 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  297 

struggles  of  the  Middle  Ages  ?  Where  is  Godfrey,  or 
Francis,  or  Dominick  ?  Nowhere.  All  has  disappeared, 
melted  away  ;  Christianity  and  Paganism  themselves 
have  melted  away  or  into  each  other,  as  in  the  easy 
meeting  of  the  Pagan  Feirefis  and  the  Christian 
Parzifal,  and  in  the  double  marriage  of  Gachmuret  with 
the  Indian  Belakane  and  the  Welsh  Herzeloid  ;  there 
remains  only  a  kind  of  Buddhistic  Nirvana  of  vague 
passive  perfection,  but  without  any  renunciation  ;  and 
in  a  world  devoid  of  evil  and  full  of  excellent  brocade 
and  armour  and  eatables,  and  lovely  maidens  who 
dress  and  undress  you,  and  chastely  kiss  you  on  the 
mouth  ;  a  world  without  desire,  aspiration,  or  combat, 
vacantly  happy  and  virtuous.  A  world  purely  ideal, 
divorced  from  all  reality,unsubstantial  like  the  kingdom 
•of  Gloriana,  but,  unlike  Spenser's,  quite  unshadowed 
by  any  puritan  sadness,  by  any  sense  of  evil,  untroubled 
by  allegorical  vices  ;  cheerful,  serene,  filled  with  flowers 
and  song  of  birds,  but  as  unreal  as  the  illuminated 
arabesques  of  a  missal.  In  truth,  perhaps  more  to  be 
compared  with  an  eighteenth  century  pastoral,  an  ideal 
created  almost  in  opposition  to  reality  ;  a  dream  of 
passiveness  and  liberty  (as  of  light  leaves  blown  about) 
as  the  ideal  of  the  fiercely  troubled,  struggling,  tightly 
fettered  feudal  world.  The  ideal,  perhaps,  of  only  one 
moment,  scarcely  of  a  whole  civilization  ;  or  rather 
(how  express  my  feeling  T)  an  accidental  combination 
of  an  instant,  as  of  spectre  vapour  arisen  from  the  mix- 
ture of  Kelt  and  Teuton,  of  Frank  and  Moslem.     Is  it 


298  EUPHORION. 

Christian,  Pagan,  Mohammedan  ?  None  of  all  these„ 
A  simple-looking  vaporous  chaos  of  incongruous, 
but  not  conflicting,  elements:  a  poem  of  virtue  without 
object,  of  knighthood  without  work,  of  religion  without 
dogma  ;  in  this  like  its  central  interest,  the  Grail  :  a  mys- 
tery, a  cup,  a  stone  ;  a  thing  which  heals,  feeds,  speaks  ; 
animate  or  inanimate?  Stone  of  the  Caaba  or  chalice 
of  the  Sacrament  ?  Merely  a  mysterious  holy  of  holies 
and  good  of  goods,  which  does  everything  and  nothing,, 
means  nothing  and  requires  nothing  ;  is  nothing. 

III. 

Thus  was  obliterated,  in  all  its  national  and  tradi- 
tional meaning,  the  heroic  cycle  of  Arthur;  and  by  the 
same  process  of  slow  adaptation  to  new  intellectual 
requirements  which  had  completely  wiped  out  of 
men's  memory  the  heroic  tales  of  Siegfried,  which  had 
entirely  altered  the  originally  realistic  character  of 
the  epic  of  Charlemagne.  But  unreal  and  ideal  as 
had  become  the  tales  of  the  Round  Table,  and  dis- 
connected with  any  national  tradition,  the  time  came 
when  even  these  were  not  sufficiently  independent  of 
reality  to  satisfy  the  capricious  imagination  of  the  later 
Middle  Ages.  At  the  end  of  the  fourteenth  century 
was  written,  most  probably  in  Portuguese  by  V  asco 
de  Lobeira,  the  tale  of  "  Amadis  de  Gaula,"  which  was 
followed  by  some  forty  or  fifty  similar  books  telling  the 
adventures  of  all  the  brothers,  nephews,  sons,  grand- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  299 

sons,  and  great-grandsons,  an  infinite  succession,  of 
the  original  Amadis  ;  which,  translated  into  all  lan- 
guages and  presently  multiplied  by  the  press,  seem  to 
have  usurped  the  place  of  the  Arthurian  stories  in 
feudal  countries  until  well-nigh  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  century  ;  and  which  were  succeeded  by  no 
more  stories  of  heroes,  but  by  the  realistic  comic 
novels  of  the  type  of  "  Lazarillo  de  Tormes,"  and  the 
buffoon  philosophic  extravaganzas  of  "  Gargantua." 
Further  indeed  it  was  impossible  to  go  than  did  medi- 
aeval idealism  in  the  Amadises.  Compared  with  them 
the  most  fairy-tale-like  Arthurian  stories  are  perfect 
historical  documents.  There  remains  no  longer  any 
connection  whatsoever  with  reality,  historical  or 
geographical :  the  whole  world  seems  to  have  been 
expeditiously  emptied  of  all  its  contents,  to  make  room 
for  kingdoms  of  Gaul,  of  Rome,  of  the  Firm  Island,  of 
Sobradisa,  etc.,  which  are  less  like  the  Land  West  of  the 
i\Ioon  and  East  of  the  Sun  than  they  are  like  Sancho 
Panza's  island.  All  real  mankind,  past,  present,  and 
future,  has  similarly  been  swept  away  and  replaced 
b)'  a  miraculous  race  of  Amadises,  Lisvarts.  Galaors, 
Gradasilias,  Orianas,  Pintiquinestras,  Fradalons,  and 
so  forth,  who  flit  across  our  vision,  in  company  with 
the  indispensable  necromancers,  fairies,  dwarfs,  giants, 
and  duennas,  like  some  huge  ballet :  things  v/ithout 
character,  passions,  pathos  ;  knights  who  are  never 
wounded  or  killed,  princesses  who  always  end  with 
marr\-ing    the    right    man,    enchanters    whose    heads 


300  EUPHORION. 

are  always  chopped  off,  foundlings  who  are  always 
reinstated  in  their  kingdom,  inane  paper  puppets 
bespangled  with  impossible  sentiment,  tinsel  and  rags 
which  are  driven  about  like  chaff  by  the  wind-puffs  of 
romance.  The  advent  of  the  Amadises  is  the  coming 
of  the  Kingdom  of  Nonsense,  the  sign  that  the  last 
days  of  chivalric  romance  have  come  ;  a  little  more, 
and  the  Licentiate  Alonzo  Perez  will  take  his  seat  in 
Don  Quixote's  library,  and  Nicholas  the  Barber  light 
his  faggots  in  the  yard. 

But,  as  if  in  compensation  of  the  usurpation  of 
which  they  had  been  the  victims,  the  Carolingian  tales, 
pushed  out  of  the  way  by  the  Arthurian  cycle,  were 
not  destined  to  perish.  Thrown  aside  with  contempt 
by  the  upper  classes,  who  were  engrossed  by  the  Round 
Table  and  the  Holy  Grail,  the  tales  of  Charlemagne 
and  his  paladins,  largely  adulterated  with  Arthurian 
elements,  were  apparently  cherished  by  a  lower  class 
of  society:  burgesses,  artizans, and  such-like,  for  whom 
that  Arthurian  world  was  far  too  etherial  and  too  deli- 
cately immoral  ;  and  to  this  circumstance  is  due 
the  fact  that  the  humiliated  Carolingian  tales  e\-en- 
tually  received  an  artistic  embodiment  which  was  not 
given  to  the  Arthurian  stories.  While  troubadours  and 
minnesingers  were  busy  with  the  court  of  Arthur, 
and  grave  Latinists  like  Rusticiano  of  Pisa  wrote 
of  Launcelot  and  Guenevere  ;  the  Carolingian  epics 
seem  to  have  been  mainly  sung  about  by  illiterate 
jongleurs,  and  to  have  busied  the  pens  of  prose  back- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  301 

writers  for  the  benefit  of  townsfolk.  The  free  towns 
of  the  Netherlands  and  of  Germany  appear  to  have 
been  full  of  this  unfashionable  literature  :  the  Caro- 
lingian  cycle  had  become  democratic.  And,  inas- 
much as  it  was  literature  no  longer  for  knights  and 
courtiers,  but  for  artizans  and  shopkeepers,  it  went,  of 
course,  to  the  pre-eminently  democratic  country  of 
the  Middle  Ages — Italy.  This  was  at  a  time  when 
Italian  was  not  yet  a  recognized  language,  and  when 
the  men  and  women  who  talked  in  Tuscan,  Lombard^ 
or  Venetian  dialects,  wrote  in  Latin  and  in  French. 
And  while  Francesca  and  Paolo  read  the  story  of 
Launcelot  most  probably  in  good  medieval  langue 
doil,  as  befitted  people  of  high  birth;  the  jongleurs, 
who  collected  crowds  so  large  as  to  bar  the  streets 
and  require  the  interference  of  the  Bolognese  magis- 
trates, sang  of  Roland  and  Oliver  in  a  sort  of  lingua 
Franca  of  French  Lombard.  French  jongleurs  sing- 
ing in  impossible  French-Italian  ;  Italian  jongleurs 
singing  in  impossible  French  ;  Paduan  penny-a-liners 
writing  Carolingian  cyclical  novels  in  French,  not  of 
Paris,  assuredly,  but  of  Padua — a  comical  and  most 
hideous  jabber  of  hybrid  languages — this  was  how 
the  Carolingian  stories  became  popular  in  Italy. 
Meanwhile,  the  day  came  when  the  romantic  Arthu- 
rian tales  had  to  dislodge  in  Italy  before  the  invasion 
of  the  classic  epic.  Troy,  Rome,  and  Thebes  had 
replaced  Tintagil  and  Caerleon  in  the  interest  of  the 
cultured    classes   long   before   the   beginning   ot  the 


302  EUPHORION. 

fifteenth  century;  when  Poggio,  in  the  very  midst  of 
the  classic  revival,  still  told  of  the  comically  engrossed 
audience  which  surrounded  the  vagabonds  singing  of 
Orlando  and  Rinaldo.  The  effete  Arthurian  cycle, 
superseded  in  Spain  and  France  by  the  Amadis 
romances,  was  speedily  forgotten  in  Italy  ;  but  the 
Carolingian  stories  remained  ;  and  when  Italian  poetry 
arose  once  more  after  the  long  interregnum  between 
Petrarch  and  Lorenzo  dei  Medici,  and  looked  about 
for  subjects,  it  laid  its  hand  upon  them.  But  when, 
in  the  second  half  of  the  fifteenth  century,  those  old 
tales  of  Charlemagne  received,  after  so  miany  centuries 
of  alterations  and  ephemeral  embodiments,  that  artis- 
tic form  which  the  INIiddle  Ages  had  been  unable  to 
give  them,  the  stories  themselves,  and  the  way  in 
\vhich  they  were  regarded,  were  totally  different  from 
what  they  had  been  in  the  time  of  Theroulde,  or  of 
the  anonymous  author  of  the  "Quatre  Fils  Aymon  ;" 
the  Renaissance,  with  its  keen  artistic  sense,  made  out 
I  of  the  Carolingian  tales  real  works  of  art,  but  works 
IJof   art  w^hich  were  playthings.     To  begin    with,   the 

I  Carolingian  stories  had  been  saturated  with  Arthurian 

II  colour  :  they  had  been  furnished  with  all  the  knight- 
errantry,  all  the  gallantry,  all  the  enchantments,  the 
fairies,  giants,  and  necromancersof  the  Keltic  legends; 
and,  moreover,  they  had  lost,  by  infinite  repetition,  all 
the  political  realism  and  meaning  so  striking  in  the 
"Chanson  de  Roland"  and  the  "Ouatre  Fils  Aymon;" 
a   confusion   and    unreality  further    increased   by  the 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  303 

fact  that  the  Italians  had  no  original  connection  with 
those  tales,  that  to  them  real  men  and  plans  were  no 
better  than  imaginary  ones,  and  that  the  minstrels 
who  sang  in  the  market-place,  and  the  laborious  prose- 
writers  who  compiled  such  collections  as  that  called 
of  the  "  Reali  di  Francia,"  were  equally  free  in  their 
alterations  and  adaptations,  creating  unknown  relation- 
ships, inventing  new  adventures,  suppressing  essential 
historical  points,  with  no  object  save  amusing  their 
audience  or  readers  with  new  stories  about  familiar 
heroes.  Such  was  the  condition  of  the  stories  them- 
selves. The  attitude  of  the  public  towards  them  was, 
by  the  middle  of  the  fifteenth  century,  one  of  com- 
plete incredulity  and  frivolous  amusement ;  the  pala- 
dins were  as  unreal  as  the  heroes  of  any  granny's 
fairy  tale.  The  people  wanted  to  hear  of  wonderful 
battles  and  adventures,  of  enchantments  and  love- 
makings  ;  but  they  wanted  also  to  laugh  ;  and,  scepti- 
cal, practical,  democratic,  the  artizans  and  shopkeepers 
of  Florence — to  whom,  paying,  as  they  did,  expensive 
mercenaries  who  stole  poultry  and  never  got  wounded 
on  any  account,  all  chivalry  or  real  military  honour 
was  the  veriest  nursery  rubbish  —  such  people  as 
crowded  round  the  cantastoria  of  niercato  vecchio,  must 
indeed  have  found  much  to  amuse  them  in  these  tales 
of  so  different  an  age. 

And  into  such  crowds  there  penetrated  to  listen  and 
watcii  (even  as  the  Magnificent  Lorenzo  had  elbowed 
among  the  carnival  ragamuffins  of  Florence,  and  had 


304  EUPHORION. 

slid  in  among  the  holiday-making  peasants  of  Poggio 
a  Caiano)  a  learned  man,  a  poet,  an  intimate  of  the 
Medicis,  of  Politian,  Ficino,  and  Pico  della  Mirandola, 
Messer  Luigi  Pulci,  the  same  who  had  written  the  semi- 
allegorical,  semi-realistic  poem  about  Lorenzo  dei 
Medici's  gala  tournament.  There  was  a  taste  in  the 
house  of  the  Medici,  together  with  the  taste  for  platonic 
philosophy,  classical  erudition,  religious  hymns,  and 
Hebrew  kabbala,  for  a  certain  kind  of  realism,  for  the 
language  and  mode  of  thinking  of  the  lower  classes,  as 
a  reaction  from  Petrarchesque  conventionality.  As 
the  Magnificent  Lorenzo  had  had  the  fancy  to  string 
together  in  more  artistic  shape  the  quaint  and  graceful 
love  poems,  hyperbolical,  realistic,  tender,  and  abusive, 
of  the  Tuscan  peasantry  ;  so  also  Messer  Luigi  Pulci 
appears  to  have  been  smitten  with  the  notion  of  trying 
his  hand  at  a  chivalric  poem  like  those  to  which  he 
and  his  friends  had  listened  among  the  butchers  and 
pork-shops,  the  fishmongers  and  frying  booths  of  the 
market,  and  giving  an  impression,  in  its  ideas  and 
language,  of  the  people  to  whom  such  strains  were 
sung.  But  Luigi  Pulci  was  vastly  less  gifted  as  a 
poet  than  Lorenzo  dei  Medici ;  Florentine  prentices 
are  less  aesthetically  pleasing  than  Tuscan  peasants, 
and  the  "  Morgante  Maggiore  "  is  a  piece  of  work  of 
a  sort  utterly  inferior  to  the  "  Nencia  da  Barberino." 
Still  the  "  Morgante  Maggiore "  remains,  and  will 
remain,  as  a  very  remarkable  production  of  grotesque 
art.     Just  as  Lorenzo  dei  Medici  was  certainly  not 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  305 

without  a  deliberate  purpose  of  selecting  the  quaint- 
ness  and  gracefulness  of  peasant  life  ;  even  so,  and 
perhaps  more,  Luigi  Pulci  must  have  had  a  deliberate 
intention  of  producing  aludicrous  effect ;  in  both  cases 
the  deliberate  attempt  is  very  little  perceptible,  in  the 
"  Nencia  da  Barberino  "  from  the  genius  of  Lorenzo, 
in  the  "  Morgante  Maggiore  "  from  the  stolidity  of 
Pulci.  The  "  Morgante,"  of  which  parts  were  prob- 
ably written  as  a  mere  sample  to  amuse  a  supper  party, 
became  interesting  to  Pulci,  in  the  mere  matter  of 
inventing  and  stringing  together  new  incidents  ;  and 
despite  its  ludicrous  passages,  it  must  have  been  more 
seriously  written  by  him,  and  more  seriously  listened 
to  by  his  friends,  than  would  a  similar  production 
novv-a-days.  For  the  men  of  the  Renaissance,  no 
matter  how  philosophized  and  cultured,  retained  the 
pleasure  in  mere  incident,  which  we  moderns  seem  to 
have  given  over  to  children  and  savages  ;  and  Lorenzo, 
Ficino,  and  Politian  probably  listened  to  the  adven- 
tures of  Luigi  Pulci's  paladins  and  giants  with  much 
the  same  interest,  and  only  a  little  more  conscious  . 
sense  of  grotesqueness,  with  which  the  crowd  in  the 
market  listened  to  Cristofano  dell'  Altissimo  and 
similar  story-tellers.  The  "  Morgante  Maggiore," 
therefore,  is  neither  really  comic  nor  really  serious. 
It  is  not  a  piece  of  realistic  grotesqueness  like  "  Gar- 
gantua  "  or  "  Pantagruel,"  any  more  than  it  is  a  serious 
ideal  work  like  "  Amadis  de  Gaula  : "  the  proportion 

of  deliberately  sought  effects  is  small  ;  the  great  bulk, 

21 


3o6  EUPHORION. 

serious  or  comic,  seems  to  have  come  quite  at  random. 
It  is  not  a  caricatured  reproduction  of  the  poems  of 
chivalry  sung  in  the  market,  for  they  were  probably 
serious,  stately,  and  bald,  with  at  most  an  occasional 
joke  ;  it  is  the  reproduction  of  the  joint  impression 
received  from  the  absurd,  harum-scarum,  unpractical 
world  of  chivalry  of  the  poet,  and  the  real  world  of 
prose,  of  good-humoured  buffoonish  coarseness  with 
which  the  itinerant  poet  was  surrounded.  The  pala- 
dins are  no  Don  Quixotes,  the  princesses  no  Dulcineas, 
the  battles  are  real  battles  ;  but  the  language  is  that 
of  Florentine  wool-workers,  housewives,  cheese-sellers, 
and  ragamuffins,  crammed  with  the  slang  of  the 
market-place,its  heavy  jokes  and  perpetual  sententious 
aphorism.  Moreover  the  prominence  given  to  food 
and  eating  is  unrivalled  except  by  Rabelais  :  the 
poet  must  have  lounged  with  delight  through  the 
narrow  mediaeval  lanes,  crowded  with  booths  and 
barrows,  sniffing  with  rapture  the  mingled  scents  of 
cheese,  pork,  fish,  spices,  and  a  hundred  strange  con- 
comitant market  smells.  And  the  market,  that 
classic  viercato  vecchio  (alas,  finally  condemned  and 
destroyed  by  modern  sanitary  prudishness,  and  which 
only  those  who  have  seen  can  conceive  in  its  full 
barbarous,  nay,  barbaric  Pantagruelian  splendour  of 
food,  blood,  and  stenches)  of  Florence,  is  what  we 
think  of  throughout  the  poem.  And,  when  Messer 
Luigi  comes  to  narrate,  with  real  gravity  and  after  the 
due  invocation  of  the  Virgin,  the  Trinity,  and  the  saints, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  307 

the  tremendous  disaster  of  Roncevaux,  he  uses  such 
words  and  such  similes,  that  above  the  neighing  of 
horses  and  the  clash  of  hurtling  armour  and  the  yells 
of  the  combatants  we  suddenly  hear  the  nasal  sing- 
song of  Florentine  tripe-vendors  and  pumpkin-pod- 
sellers,  the  chaffer  and  oaths  and  laughter  of  the  glut- 
tonous crowd  pouring  through  the  lanes  of  Calimala 
and  Pellicceria  ;  nay  (horrible  and  grotesque  miracle), 
there  seems  to  rise  out  of  the  confused  darkness  of 
the  battle-filled  valley,  there  seems  to  disengage  itself 
(as  out  of  a  mist)  from  the  chaos  of  heaped  bodies, 
and  the  flash  of  steel  among  the  whirlwinds  of  dust,  a 
vision,  more  and  more  distinct  and  familiar,  of  the 
crowded  square  with  its  black  rough-hewn,  smoke- 
stained  houses,  ornamented  with  Robbia-ware  angels 
and  lilies  or  painted  madonnas ;  of  its  black  butchers' 
dens,  outside  which  hang  the  ghastly  disembowelled 
sheep  with  blood-stained  fleeces,  the  huge  red-veined 
hearts  and  livers;  of  the  piles  of  cabbage  and  cauli- 
flowers, the  rows  of  tin  ware  and  copper  saucepans, 
the  heaps  of  maccaroni  and  pastes,  of  spices  and 
drugs  ;  the  garlands  of  onions  and  red  peppers  and 
piles  of  apples  ;  the  fetid  sliminess  of  the  fish  tressels  ; 
the  rough  pavement  oozy  and  black,  slippery  with 
cabbage-stalks,  puddled  with  bullock's  blood,  strewn 
with  plucked  feathers — all  under  the  bright  blue  sky, 
Avith  Giotto's  dove-coloured  belfry  soaring  high  above ; 
a  vision,  finally,  of  one  of  those  deep  dens,  with  walls 
all    covered    with    majolica    plates    and    dishes    and 


3o8  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

flashing  brass-embossed  trenchers,  in  the  dark  depths 
of  which  crackles  perennially  a  ruddy  fire,  while  a 
huge  spit  revolves,  offering  to  the  flames  now  one 
now  the  other  side  of  scores  of  legs  of  mutton,  rounds 
of  beef,  and  larded  chickens,  trickling  with  the  butter 
unceasingly  ladled  by  the  white-dressed  cooks, 
Roncisvalle,  Charlemagne,  the  paladins,  paganism, 
Christendom — what  of  them  ?  "I  believe  in  capon, 
roast  or  boiled,  and  sometimes  done  in  butter  ;  in 
mead  and  in  must  ;  and  I  believe  in  the  pasty  and 
the  pastykins,  mother  and  children  ;  but  above  all 
things  I  believe  in  good  wine" — as  Margutte  snuffles 
out  in  his  catechism  ;  and  as  to  Saracens  and  pala- 
dins, past,  present,  and  future,  a  fig  for  them  ! 

But  meanwhile,  for  all  that  Florentine  burgesses, 
artizans,  and  humorists  may  think,  there  is  in  this 
Italy  of  the  Renaissance  something  besides  Florence  ; 
there  is  a  school  of  poetry,  disconnected  with  the 
realisms  of  Lorenzo  and  Pulci,  with  the  Ovidian 
Petrarchisms  of  Politian.  There  is  Ferrara.  Lying, 
as  they  do,  between  the  Northern  Apennine  slopes  of 
Modena  and  the  Euganean  hills,  the  dominions  of  the 
House  of  Este  appear  at  first  sight  mereh^as  part  and 
parcel  of  Lombardy,  and  we  should  expect  from  them 
nothing  very  different  from  that  which  we  expect  from 
Milan  or  Bologna  or  Padua.  But  the  truth  is  different ; 
all  round  Ferrara,  indeed,  stretches  the  fertile  flatness 
of  Lombard  cornfields,  and  they  produce,  as  infallibly 
as  they  produce  their  sacks  of  grain  and  tuns  of  wine 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  309 

and  heaps  of  silk  cocoon,  the  intellectual  and  social 
equivalents  of  such  things  in  Renaissance  Italy  :  in- 
dustry, wealth,  comfort,  scepticism,  art.  But  on  either 
side,  into  the  defiles  of  the  Euganean  hills  to  the 
north,  into  the  widening  torrent  valleys  of  the  Mode- 
nese  Apennines  to  the  south,  the  Marquisate  of  Este 
stretches  up  into  feudalism,  into  chivalry,  into  the 
imaginative  kingdom  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Medi- 
sevalism,  feudalism,  chivalry,  indeed,  of  a  very  modified 
sort  ;  and  as  different  from  that  of  France  and 
Germany  as  differ  from  the  poverty-stricken  plains 
and  forests  and  arid  moors  of  the  north  these  Italian 
mountain  slopes,  along  which  the  vines  crawl  in  long 
trellises,  and  the  chestnuts  rise  in  endlessly  superposed 
tiers  of  terraces,  cultivated  by  a  peasant  who  is  not  the 
serf,  but  the  equal  sharer  in  profits  with  the  master  of 
the  soil.  And  on  one  of  those  fertile  hill-sides,  looking 
down  upon  a  narrow  valley  all  a  green-blue  shimmer 
with  corn  and  vine-bearing  elms,  was  born,  in  the 
year  1434,  Alatteo  Maria  Boiardo,  in  the  village  which 
gave  him  the  title,  one  of  the  highest  in  the  Estensian 
dominions,  of  Count  of  Scandiano.  Here,  in  the 
Apennines,  Scandiano  is  a  fortified  village,  also  a 
castle,  doubtless  half  turned  into  a  Renaissance  villa, 
but  mediaeval  and  feudal  nevertheless ;  but  the  name 
of  Scandiano  belongs  also,  I  know  not  for  what  reason, 
to  a  certain  little  red-brick  palace  on  the  outskirts  of 
Ferrara,  beautifully  painted  with  half-allegorical,  half- 
realistic  pageant  frescoes  by  Cosimo  Tura,  and  en- 


310  EUPHORION. 

closing  a  sweet  tangled  orchard-garden  ;  to  all  of 
which,  being  the  place  to  which  Duke  Borso  and  Duke 
Ercole  were  wont  to  retire  for  amusement,  the  Ferra- 
rese  have  given  the  further  name  of  Schifanoia,  which 
means,  "  fly  from  cares."  This  little  coincidence  of 
Scandiano  the  feudal  castle  in  the  Apennines,  and 
Scandiano  the  little  pleasure  palace  at  Ferrara,  seems 
I  to  give,  by  accidental  allegory,  a  fair  idea  of  the 
double  nature  of  Matteo  Boiardo,  of  the  Ferrarese 
court  to  which  he  belonged,  and  of  the  school  of  poetry 
(including  the  more  notable  but  less  original  work  of 
Ariosto)  which  the  genius  of  the  man  and  the  character 
of  the  court  succeeded  together  in  producing. 

To  understand  Boiardo  we  must  compare  him  with 
Ariosto ;  and  to  understand  Ariosto  we  must  compare 
him  with  Boiardo  ;  both  belong  to  the  same  school, 
and  are  men  of  very  similar  genius,  and  where  the  one 
leaves  off  the  other  begins.  But  first,  in  order  to 
understand  the  character  of  this  poetry  which,  in  the 
main,  is  identical  in  Boiardo  and  in  his  more  successful 
but  less  fascinating  pupil  Ariosto,  let  us  understand 
Ferrara.  It  was,  in  the  late  fifteenth  and  early  six- 
teenth centuries,  a  chivalric  town  of  Ariostesque 
chivalry  :  feudalism  turned  courtly  and  elegant,  and, 
moreover,  very  liberal  and  comfortable  by  prepon- 
derance of  democratic  and  industrial  habits  ;  a  mili- 
tary court,  of  brave  mercenary  captains  full  of  dash 
\  N  and   adventure,    not   mere   brigands   and  marauders, 

having  studied  strategy,  like  the  little  Umbrian  chief- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  311 

tains;  a  court  orderly,  elegant,  and  brilliant:  a  prince 
not  risen  from  behind  a  counter  like  Medicis  and  Pe- 
truccis,  nor  out  of  blood  like  Baglionis  and  Sforzas,  but 
of  a  noble  old  house  whose  beginnings  are  lost  in  the 
mist  of  real  chivalry  and  real  paladinism  ;  a  duke  with 
a  pretence  of  feudal  honour  and  decorum,  at  whose 
court  men  were  all  brave  and  ladies  all  chaste — with 
the  little  licenses  of  baseness  and  gallantry  admitted 
by  Renaissance  chivalry,  A  bright,  brilliant  court  at 
the  close  of  the  fifteenth  century  ;  and  more  stable 
than  the  only  one  which  might  have  rivalled  it,  the 
Feltrian  court  of  Urbino,  too  small  and  lost  among 
the  Umbrian  bandits,  A  bright,  brilliant  town,  also, 
this  Ferrara  :  not  mercantile  like  Florence,  not  mere 
barracks  like  Perugia  ;  a  capital,  essentially,  in  its  rich 
green  plain  by  the  widened  Po,  with  its  broad  handsome 
streets  (so  different  from  the  mediaeval  exchanges  of 
Bologna,  and  the  feudal  alleys  of  Perugia),  its  well- 
built  houses,  so  safe  and  modern,  needing  neither 
bravi  nor  iron  window  bars,  protected  (except  against 
some  stray  murder  by  one  of  the  Estensi  themselves), 
by  the  duke's  well-organized  police  ;  houses  with  well- 
trimmed  gardens,  like  so  many  Paris  hotels  ;  and  with 
the  grand  russet  brick  castle,  military  with  its  moat 
and  towers,  urban  with  its  belvederes  and  balconies,  in 
the  middle,  well  placed  to  sweep  away  with  its  guns 
(the  wonderful  guns  of  the  duke's  own  making)  any 
riot,  tidily,  cleanly,  without  a  nasty  heap  of  bodies  and 
slop  of  blood  as  in  the  narrow  streets  of  other  towns. 


312  EUPHORION. 

Imagine  this  bright  capital,  placed,  moreover,  in  the 
richest  centre  of  Lombardy,  with  ghtter  of  chivalry 
from  the  Euganean  hills  and  Apennines  (castellated 
with  Este,  Monselice,Canossa,  and  Boiardo's  own  Scan- 
diano);  with  gorgeous  rarities  of  commerce  from  Venice 
and  Milan — a  central,  unique  spot.  It  is  the  natural 
home  of  the  chivalrous  poets  of  the  Renaissance, 
Boiardo,  Ariosto,  Tasso ;  as  Florence  is  of  the  Politians 
and  Pulcis  (Hellenism  and  back-shopery) ;  and  Venice 
of  the  literature  of  lust,  jests,  cynicism,  and  adventure, 
Aretine,  Beolco,  Calmo,  and  Poliphilo-Colonna.  In 
that  garden,  where  the  white  butterflies  crowd  among 
the  fruit  trees  bowed  down  to  the  tall  grass  of  the  palace 
of  Schifanoia — a  garden  neither  grand  nor  classic,  but 
elegiac  and  charming — we  can  imagine  Boiardo  or 
Ariosto  reading  their  poems  to  just  such  a  goodly 
company  as  Giraldi  Cinthio  (a  Ferrarese,  and  fond 
of  romance,  too)  describes  in  the  prologue  of  his 
"  Ecatomiti  : "  gentle  and  sprightful  ladies,  with  the 
splendid  brocaded  robes,  and  the  gold-filleted  golden 
hair  of  Dosso  Dossi's  wonderful  Alcina  Circe;  graceful 
youths  like  the  princely  St.  John  of  Benvenuto 
Garofalo  ;  jesters  like  Dosso's  at  Modena ;  brilliant 
captains  like  his  St.  George  and  St.  Michael  ;  and  a 
little  crowd  of  pages  with  doublets  and  sleeves  laced 
with  gold  tags,  of  sedate  magistrates  in  fur  robes 
and  scarlet  caps,  of  white-dressed  maids  with  in- 
struments of  music  and  embroidery  frames  and  hand 
looms,  like  those  which  Cosimo  Tura  painted  for  Duke 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  313 

Borso  on  the  walls  of  this  same  Schifanoia  palace 
Such  is  the  audience  ;  now  for  the  poems. 

The  stuff  of  Boiardo  and  Ariosto  is  the  same:  that 
old  mediaeval  stuff  of  the  Carolingian  poems,  coloured, 
scented  with  Arthurian  chivalry  and  wonder.  The 
knight-errantry  of  the  Keltic  tales  is  cleverly  blended 
with  the  pseudo-historical  military  organization  of 
the  Carolingian  cycle.  Paladins  and  Saracens  are 
ingeniously  manceuvred  about,  now  scattered  in  little 
groups  of  twos  and  threes,  to  encounter  adventures 
in  the  style  of  Sir  Launcelot  or  Amadis;  now  gathered 
into  a  compact  army  to  crash  upon  each  other  as  at 
Roncevaux  ;  or  else  wildly  flung  up  by  the  poet  to 
alight  in  fairyland,  to  find  themselves  in  the  caverns 
of  Jamschid,  in  the  isles  where  Oberon's  mother 
kept  Caesar,  and  Morgana  kept  Ogier,  in  the  boats, 
entering  subterranean  channels,  of  Sindbad  and 
Huon  of  Bordeaux  ;  a  constant  alternation  of  in- 
dividual adventure  and  wholesale  organized  cam- 
paigns, conceived  and  carried  out  with  admirable 
ingenuity.  So  much  for  the  deeds  of  arms.  The 
deeds  of  love  are  also  compounded  of  Carolingian  and 
Arthurian,  but  flavoured  with  special  Renaissance 
feeling.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  rapid  love-making 
between  too  gallant  knights  and  too  impressionable 
ladies;  licentious  amours  which  we  moderns  lay  at  the 
door  of  Boiardo  and  Ariosto,  not  knowing  that  the 
licentiousness  of  the  Olivers  and  Ogiers  and  Guerins 
and  Huons  of  mediaeval  poetry,  of  the  sentimental 


314  EUPHORION. 

Amadises,  Galaors,  and  Lisvarts  of  the  fourteenth 
century,  whom  the  Renaissance  has  toned  down  in 
Rogers  and  Rinaldos  and  Ricciardettos,  is  by  many 
degrees  worse.  A  moral  improvement  also  (for  all 
the  immorality  of  the  Renaissance)  in  the  eschewing 
of  the  never-failing  adultery  of  the  Arthurian  ro- 
mances, and  the  appropriation  to  legitimately  faithful 
love  of  the  poetical  devotion  which  Tristram  and 
Launcelot  bear  to  other  men's  wives.  To  this  are 
added,  and  more  by  Ariosto  than  by  Boiardo,  two 
essentially  Italian  elements  :  something  of  the  nobility 
of  passion  of  the  Platonic  sonneteers ;  and  a  good  dose 
of  the  ironical,  scurrilous,  moralizing  immoral  anecdote 
gossiping  of  Boccaccio  and  Sacchetti.  Such  is  the 
stuff.  The  conception,  though  rarely  comic,  and 
sometimes  bond  fide  serious,  is  never  earnest.  All 
this  is  a  purely  artistic  world,  a  world  of  decorative 
arabesque  incident,  intended  to  please,  scarcely  ever 
to  move,  or  to  move,  at  most,  like  some  Decameronian 
tale  of  Isabella  and  the  Basil  Plant,  or  Constance  and 
Martuccio.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  none  of  the 
grotesque  irreverence  of  Pulci.  Boiardo  and  Ariosto 
are  not  in  earnest ;  they  are  well  aware  that  their  heroes 
and  heroines  are  mere  modern  men  and  women  tricked 
out  in  pretty  chivalric  trappings,  driven  wildly  about 
from  Paris  to  Cathay,  and  from  Spain  to  the  Orkneys — 
on  Tony  Lumpkin's  principle  of  driving  his  mother 
round  and  round  the  garden  plot  till  she  thought  herself 
on  a  heath  six  miles  off — without  ever  really  changing 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  315 

place.  But  they  do  not,  like  Pulci,  make  fun  of  their 
characters.  They  write  chivalry  romances  not  for 
Florentine  pork-butchers  and  wool-carders,  but  for 
gallant  ladies  and  gentlemen,  to  whom,  with  duels, 
tournaments,  serenades,  and  fine  speeches,  chivalry  is, 
an  admired  name,  though  no  longer  a  respected  reality. 
The  heroes  of  Boiardo  and  of  Ariosto  are  always 
bold  and  gallant  and  glittering,  the  spirit  of  romance 
is  in  them  ;  a  giant  Sancho  Panza  like  ]\Iorgante, 
redolent  of  sausage  and  cheese,  would  never  be  ad- 
mitted into  the  society  of  a  Ferrarese  Orlando.  The 
art  of  Boiardo  and  of  Ariosto  is  eminently  pageant 
art,  in  which  sentiment  and  heroism  are  but  as  one 
element  among  many  ;  there  is  no  pretence  at  reality 
(although  there  is  a  good  deal  of  incidental  realism), 
and  no  thought  of  the  interest  in  subject  and  persons 
which  goes  with  reality.  It  is  a  masquerade,  and  one 
whose  men  and  women  must,  I  think,  be  imagined 
in  a  kind  of  artistic  fancy  costume  :  a  mixture  of  the 
Renaissance  dress  and  of  the  antique,  as  we  see  it  in 
the  prints  of  contemporary  pageants,  and  in  Venetian 
and  Ferrarese  pictures  ;  that  Circe  of  Dosso's,  in  the' 
Borghese  gallery  of  Rome,  seated  in  her  stately  wine- 
lees  and  gold  half-heraldically  and  half-cabalistically 
patterned  brocade,  before  the  rose-bushes  of  the  little 
mysterious  wood,  is  the  very  ideal  of  the  Falerinas 
and  Alcinas,  of  the  enchantresses  of  Boiardo  and 
Ariosto.  Pageant  people,  these  of  the  Ferrarese 
poets  ;  the}^  only  play  at  being  in  forests  and  deserts. 


2j5  EUPHORION. 

as  children  play  at  being  on  volcanoes  or  in  Green- 
land by  the  nursery  fire.  It  is  a  kind  of  dressing  up, 
a  masquerading  of  the  fancy  ;  not  disguising  in  order 
to  deceive,  but  rather  laying  hold  of  any  pretty  or 
brilliant  impressive  garb  that  comes  to  hand,  and 
putting  that  on  in  conjunction  with  many  odds  and 
ends,  as  an  artist's  guests  might  do  with  the  silks  and 
velvets  and  Oriental  properties  of  a  studio.  These 
knights  and  ladies,  for  ever  tearing  about  from  Scot- 
land to  India,  never,  in  point  of  fact,  get  any  further 
than  the  Apennine  slopes  where  Boiardo  was  born, 
where  Ariosto  governed  the  Garfagnana.  They  ride 
for  ever  (while  supposed  to  be  in  the  Ardennes  or  in 
Egypt)  across  the  velvet  moss  turf,  all  patterned  with 
minute  starry  clovers  and  the  fallen  white  ropy 
chestnut  blossom,  amidst  the  bracken  beneath  the 
slender  chestnut  trees,  the  pale  blue  sky  looking  in 
between  their  spreading  branches  ;  at  most  they  lose 
their  way  in  the  intricacies  of  some  seaside  pineta, 
where  the  feet  slip  on  the  fallen  needles,  and  the  sun 
slants  along  the  vistas  of  serried,  red,  scaly  trunks, 
among  the  juniper  and  gorse  and  dry  grass  and 
flowers  growing  in  the  sea  sand.  Into  the  vast  medi- 
aeval forests  of  Germany  and  France,  Boiardo  and 
Ariosto's  fancy  never  penetrated. 

\  Such  is  the  school  :  a  school  represented  in  its 
typical  character  only  by  Boiardo  and  Ariosto,  but  to 
which  belong,  nevertheless,  with  whatever  differences, 

'  Tasso,  Spenser,  Camoens,  all  the  poets  of  Renaissance 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  317 

romance.  Now  of  the  two  leaders  thereof.  Here  I 
feel  that  I  can  speak  only  personally  ;  tell  only  of 
my  own  personal  impressions  and  preferences.  Com- 
paring together  Boiardo  and  Ariosto,  I  am,  of  course, 
aware  of  the  infinite  advantages  of  the  latter.  Ariosto 
is  a  man  of  far  more  varied  genius ;  he  is  an  artist, 
while  Boiardo  is  an  amateur ;  he  is  learned  in  arranging 
and  ornamenting  ;  he  knows  how  to  alternate  various 
styles,  how  to  begin  and  how  to  end.  IMoreover,  he 
is  a  scholarly  person  of  a  more  scholarly  time  :  he  is 
familiar  with  the  classics,  and,  what  is  more  important, 
he  is  familiar  with  the  language  in  which  he  is  writing. 
He  writes  exquisitely  harmonious,  supple,  and  brilliant 
Tuscan  verse,  with  an  infinite  richness  of  diction  ;  while 
poor  Boiardo  jogs  along  in  a  language  which  is  not  the 
Lombard  dialect  in  which  he  speaks,  and  which  is  very 
uncouth  and  awkward,  as  is  every  pure  language  for 
a  provincial  ;  indeed,  so  much  so,  that  the  pedantic 
Tuscans  require  Berni  to  make  Tuscan,  elegant,  to 
ingeiitilire^  with  infinite  loss  to  quaintness  and  charm, 
the  "Orlando  Innamorato"  of  poor  Ferrarese  Boiardo, 
Moreover,  Ariosto  has  many  qualities  unknown  to 
Boiardo ;  wit,  malice,  stateliness,  decided  eloquence 
and  power  of  simile  and  apostrophe ;  he  is  a  symphony 
for  full  orchestra,  and  Boiardo  a  mere  melody  played 
on  a  single  fiddle,  which  good  authorities  (and  no  one 
dare  contest  with  Italians  when  they  condemn  any- 
thing not  Tuscan  as  jargon)  pronounce  to  be  no 
Cremona.      All   these   advantages  Ariosto   certainly 


3i8  E  UP  HO  R  ION. 

has  ;  and  I  do  not  quarrel  with  those  who  prefer  him 
for  them.  But  many  of  them  distinctly  take  away 
from  my  pleasure.  I  confess  that  I  am  bored  by  the 
beautifully  written  moral  and  allegorical  preludes  of 
Ariosto's  cantos  ;  I  would  willingiy  give  all  his  apho- 
rism and  all  his  mythology  to  get  quickly  to  the 
story.  Also,  I  resent  his  admirable  rhetorical  flourishes 
about  his  patrons,  his  Ercoles,  Ippolitos,  and  Isabellas 
— they  ring  false,  dreadfully  false  and  studied  ;  and 
Boiardo's  quickly  despatched  friendly  greeting  of  his 
friends,  his  courteous  knights  and  gentle  ladies,  pleases 
me  much  better.  Moreover,  the  all-pervading  con- 
sciousness of  the  existence  of  Homer,  Virgil,  nay, 
Statius  and  Lucan,  every  trumpery  antique  epic- 
monger,  annoys  me,  giving  an  uncomfortable  doubt 
as  to  whether  Ariosto  did  not  try  to  make  all  this 
nonsense  serious,  and  this  romance  into  an  epic  ;  all 
this  occasional  Virgilian  stateliness,  alternated  with 
a  kind  of  polished  Decameronian  gossipy  cynicism, 
diverts  my  attention,  turns  paladins  and  princesses 
too  much  into  tutor-educated  gentlemen,  into  Bandello 
and  Cinthio-reading  ladies  of  the  sixteenth  century. 
The  picture  painted  by  Ariosto  is  finer,  but  you  see 
too  much  of  the  painter  ;  he  and  his  patrons  take  up 
nearly  the  whole  foreground,  and  they  have  affected, 
idealized  faces  and  would-be  dignified  poses.  For 
these  and  many  other  reasons,  I  personally  prefer 
Boiardo  ;  and  perhaps  the  best  reason  for  my  pre- 
ference is  the  irrational  one  that  he  gives  me  more 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  319 

pleasure.  My  preferences,  my  impressions,  I  have 
said,  are  in  this  matter,  much  less  critical  than  per- 
sonal. Hence  I  can  speak  of  Boiardo  only  as  he 
affects  me. 

When  first  I  read  Boiardo,  I  was  conscious  of  a 
curious  phenomenon  in  myself.  I  must  confess  to 
reading  books  usually  in  a  very  ardent  or  rather  weary 
manner,  either  way  in  a  hurry  to  finish  them.  As  it 
happened,  when  I  borrowed  Boiardo,  I  had  a  great 
many  other  things  on  hand  which  required  my  time 
and  attention  ;  yet  I  could  not  make  up  my  mind  to 
return  the  book  until  I  had  finished  it,  though  my 
mtention  had  been  merely  to  satisfy  my  curiosity  by 
a  dip  into  it.  I  went  on,  without  that  eager  desire  to 
know  what  follows  which  one  has  in  a  novel  ;  drowsily 
with  absolute  reluctance  to  leave  off,  like  the  reluctance 
to  rise  from  the  grass  beneath  the  trees  with  only 
butterflies  and  shadows  to  watch,  or  the  reluctance  to 
put  aside  some  fairy  book  of  Walter  Crane's.  It  was 
like  strolling  in  some  quaint,  ill-trimmed,  old  garden, 
finding  fresh  flowers,  fresh  bits  of  lichened  walls,  fresh 
fragments  of  broken  earthenware  ornaments;  or,  rather, 
more  like  a  morning  in  the  Cathedral  Library  at 
Siena,  the  place  where  the  gorgeous  choir  books  are 
kept,  itself  illuminated  like  missal  pages  by  Pinturic- 
chio :  amused,  delighted,  not  moved  nor  fascinated  ; 
finding  every  moment  something  new,  some  charming 
piece  of  gilding,  some  sweet  plumed  head,  some  quaint 
little  tree  or  town  ;  making  a  journey  of  lazy  discovery 


320  EUPHORION. 

in  a  sort  of  world  of  Prince  Charmings,  the  real  realm 
of  the  "  Faery  Queen,"  quite  different  in  enchantment 
from  the  country  of  Spenser's  Gloriana,  with  its  pale 
allegoric  ladies  and    knights,  half-human,  half-meta- 
physical, and  its  make-believe  allegorical  ogres  and 
giants.     This  is  the  real  Fairyland,  this  of  Boiardo  : 
no    mere   outskirts   of  Ferrara,    with   real,   playfully 
cynical    Ferrarese  men    and    women    tricked    out   as 
paladins   and    Amazons,   and    making    fun    of   their 
disguise,  as  in  Ariosto  ;  no  wonderland  of  Tasso,  with 
enchanted  gardens  copied  out  of  Bolognese  pictures 
and  miraculous  forests  learned  from  theatre  mechani- 
cians, wonders  imitated  by  a  great  poet  from  the  card- 
board   and    firework    wonders    of  Bianca   Cappello's 
wedding  feasts.    This  is  the  real  fairyland,  the  wonder- 
land of  mediaeval  romance  and  of  Persian  and  Arabian 
tales,  no  longer  solemn  or  awful,  but  brilliant,  sunny, 
only  half  believed  in ;  the  fairyland  of  the  Renaissance, 
superficially  artistic,  with  its  lightest,  brightest  fancies, 
and  its  charming  realities  ;  its  cloistered  and  painted 
courts  with  plashing  fountains,  its  tapestried  and  inlaid 
rooms,  its  towered  and    belvedered  villas,  its  quaint 
clipped    gardens  full  of  strange  Oriental  plants  and 
beasts ;    and    all    this  transported   into  a  country  of 
wonders,  where  are  the  gardens  of  the  Hesperides,  the 
fountain  of  Merlin,  the  tomb  of  Narcissus,  the  castle 
of  Morgan-le-Fay  ;  every  quaint  and  beautiful  fancy^ 
antique  and  mediaeval,  mixed  up  together,  as  in  some 
Renaissance  picture  of  Botticelli  or  Rosselli  or  Filip- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  321 

pino,  where  knights  in  armour  descend  from  Pegasus 
before  Roman  temples,  where  swarthy  white-turbaned 
Turks,  with  oddly  bunched-up  trousers  and  jewelled 
caftans,  and  half-naked,  oak-crowned  youths,  like  genii 
descended,  pensive  and  wondering,  from  some  antique 
sarcophagus,and  dapper  princelets  and  stalwart  knights, 
and  citizens  and  monks,  all  crowd  round  the  altar  of 
some  wonder-working  Macone  or  Apolline  or  Trevi- 
gante  ;  some  comic,  dreadful,  apish  figure,  mummed 
up  in  half-antique,  half-oriental  garb.  Or  else  we  are 
led  into  some  dainty,  pale-tinted  panel  of  Botticelli, 
where  the  maidens  dance  in  white  clinging  clothes, 
strewing  flowers  on  to  the  flower-freaked  turf;  or  into 
some  of  Poliphilo's  vignettes,  where  the  gentle  ladies, 
seated  with  lute  and  viol  under  vine-trellises,  welcome 
the  young  gallant,  or  poet,  or  knight. 

Such  is  the  world  of  Boiardo.  Spenser  has  once 
or  twice  peeped  in,  painted  it,  and  given  us  exquisite 
little  pictures,  as  that  of  Malecasta's  castle,  all  hung 
with  mythological  tapestries,  that  of  the  enchanted 
chamber  of  Britomart,  and  those  of  Sir  Calidore  meet- 
ing the  Graces  and  of  Hellenore  dancing  with  the 
Satyrs  ;  but  Spenser  has  done  it  rarely,  trembling  to 
return  to  his  dreary  allegories.  Equal  to  these  single 
pictures  by  Spenser,  Boiardo  has  only  one  or  two,  but 
he  keeps  us  permanently  in  the  world  where  such 
pictures  are  painted.  Boiardo  is  not  a  great  artist 
like  Spenser ;  but  he  is  a  wizard,  which  is  better.  He 
leads  us,  unceasingly,  through  the  little  dreamy  laurel- 

22 


322  EUPHORION. 

woods,  where  we  meet  crisp-haired  damsels  tied  to 
pine-trees,  or  terrible  dragons,  or  enchanted  wells, 
through  whose  translucent  green  waters  we  see 
brocaded  rooms  full  of  fair  ladies  ;  he  ferries  us  ever 
and  anon  across  shallow  streams,  to  the  castles  where 
gentil  donzelle  wave  their  kerchiefs  from  the  pillared 
belvedere  ;  he  slips  us  unseen  into  the  camps  and 
council-rooms  of  the  splendidly  trapped  Saracens, 
like  so  many  figures  out  of  Filippino's  frescoes ;  he 
conducts  us  across  the  bridges  where  giants  stand 
warders,  to  the  mysterious  carved  tombs  whence  issue 
green  and  crested  snakes,  who,  kissed  by  a  paladin, 
turn  into  lovely  enchantresses  ;  he  takes  us  beneath 
the  beds  of  rivers  and  through  the  bowels  of  the  earth 
where  kings  and  knights  turned  into  statues  of  gold, 
sit  round  tables  covered  with  jewels,  illumined  by 
carbuncles  more  wonderful  than  that  of  Jamschid  ;  or 
through  the  mazes  of  fairy  gardens,  where  every  ear 
of  corn,  cut  off,  turns  into  a  wild  beast,  and  every 
fallen  leaf  into  a  bird,  where  hydras  watch  in  the  waters 
and  lamias  rear  themselves  in  the  grass,  where  Orlando 
must  fill  his  helmet  with  roses  lest  he  hear  the  voice 
of  the  sirens  ;  where  all  the  wonders  of  Antiquity — the 
snake-women,  the  Circes,  the  sirens,  the  hydras  and 
fauns  live,  strangely  changed  into  something  infinitely 
quaint  and  graceful,  still  half-antique,  yet  already  half- 
Arabian  or  Keltic,  in  the  midst  of  the  fairyland  of 
Merlin  and  of  Oberon — live,  move,  transform  them- 
selves afresh  ;  where  the  golden-haired  damsels  and 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  323 

the  stripling  knights,  delicate  like  Pinturicchio's  Prince 
Charmings,  gallop  for  ever  on  their  enchanted  coursers, 
within  enchanted  armour,  invincible,  invulnerable, 
under  a  sky  always  blue,  and  through  an  unceasing 
spring,  ever  onwards  to  new  adventures.  Adventures 
which  the  noble,  gentle  Castellan  of  Scandiano,  poet 
and  knight  and  humorist,  philanthropical  philosopher 
almost  from  sheer  goodness  of  heart,  yet  a  little  crazy, 
and  capable  of  setting  all  the  church  bells  ringing  in 
honour  of  the  invention  of  the  name  of  Rodomonte 
— relates  not  to  some  dully  ungrateful  Alfonso  or 
Ippolito,  but  to  his  own  guests,  his  own  brilliant 
knights  and  ladies,  with  ever  and  anon  an  effort  to 
make  them  feel,  through  his  verse,  some  of  those 
joyous  spring-tide  feelings  which  bubble  up  in  himself; 
as  when  he  remembers  how,  "Once  did  I  wander  on 
a  May  morning  in  a  fair  flower-adorned  field  on  a 
hillside  overlooking  the  sea,  which  was  all  tremulous 
with  light  ;  and  there,  among  the  roses  of  a  green 
thorn-brake,  a  damsel  was  singing  of  love  ;  singing 
so  sweetly  that  the  sweetness  still  touches  my  heart ; 
touchesmyheart,and  makes  methinkof  thegreatdelight 
it  was  to  listen;"  and  how  he  would  fain  repeat  that 
song,  and  indeed  an  echo  of  its  sweetness  runs  through 
his  verse.  Meanwhile,  stanza  pours  out  after  stanza, 
adventure  grows  out  of  adventure,  each  more  won- 
derful, more  gorgeous  than  its  predecessor.  To  which 
listen  the  ladies,  with  their  white,  girdled  dresses  and 
crimped   golden    locks  ;    the  youths,  with  their  soft 


324  EUPHORION. 

beardless  faces  framed  in  combed-out  hair,  with  iheir 
daggers  on  their  hips  and  their  plumed  hats  between 
their  fingers  ;  and  the  serious  bearded  men,  in  silken 
robes  ;  drawing  nearer  the  poet,  letting  go  lute  or 
violin  or  music-book  as  they  listen  on  the  villa  terrace 
or  in  some  darkened  room,  where  the  sunset  sky  turns 
green-blue  behind  the  pillared  window,  and  the  roses 
hang  over  the  trellise  of  the  cloister.  And  as  they 
did  four  hundred  years  ago,  so  do  we  now,  rejoice. 
The  great  stalwart  naked  forms  of  Greece  no  longer 
leap  and  wrestle  or  carry  their  well-poised  baskets  of 
washed  linen  before  us ;  the  mailed  and  vizored  knights 
of  the  Nibelungen  no  longer  clash  their  armour  to  the 
sound  of  Volker's  red  fiddle-bow  ;  the  glorified  souls 
of  Dante  no  longer  move  in  mystic  mazes  of  light 
fcefore  the  eyes  of  our  fancy.  All  that  is  gone.  But 
here  is  the  fairyland  of  the  Renaissance.  And  thus 
Matteo  Boiardo,  Count  of  Scandiano,  goes  on,  adding 
adventure  to  adventure,  stanza  to  stanza,  in  his  castle 
villa,  or  his  palace  at  Ferrara.  But  suddenly  he  stops 
and  his  bright  fiddle  and  lute  music  jars  and  ends : 
"  While  I  am  singing,  O  Redeeming  God,  I  see  all  Italy 
set  on  fire  by  these  Gauls,  coming  to  ravage  I  know 
not  what  fresh  place." 

And  thus,  with  the  earlier  and  more  hopeful  Re- 
naissance of  the  fifteenth  century,  Matteo  Boiardo 
broke  off  with  his  "Orlando  Innamorato."  The  perfect 
light-heartedness,  the  delight  in  play  of  a  gentle, 
serious,  eminently  kindly  nature,  which  gives  half  the 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  325 

charm  to  Boiardo's  work,  seems  to  have  become  im- 
possible after  the  ruin  of  Italian  liberty  and  prosperity, 
the  frightful  showing  up  of  Italy's  moral  and  social 
and  political  insignificance  at  the  beginning  of  the 
sixteenth  century.  Lombardy  especially  became  a 
permanent  battle-field,  and  its  towns  mere  garrison 
places  of  French,  German,  Spanish,  and  Swiss  bar- 
barians, whose  presence  meant  slaughter  and  pillage 
and  every  foulest  outrage ;  and  then,  between  the 
horrors  of  the  unresisted  invasions  and  the  unresisted 
exactions,  came  plague  and  famine,  and  industry  and 
commerce  gradually  died  out.  A  few  princes,  sub- 
sidised and  guarded  by  French  or  Imperialists,  kept 
up  an  appearance  of  cheerfulness,  but  the  courts  even 
grew  more  gloomy  as  the  people  grew  more  miserable.- 
There  is  more  joking,  more  resonant  laughter  in 
Ariosto  than  in  Boiardo,  but  there  is  very  much  less 
serenity  and  cheerfulness  ;  ever  and  anon  a  sort  of 
bitterness,  a  dreary  moralizing  tendency,  a  still  more 
dreary  fit  of  prophesying  future  good  in  which  he  has 
no  belief,  comes  over  Ariosto.  Berni,  who  rewrote  the 
"  Orlando  Innamorato "  in  choice  Tuscan,  and  who 
underlined  every  faintly  marked  jest  of  Boiardo's,  with 
evident  preoccupation  of  the  ludicrous  effects  of  the 
"  Morgante  Maggiore  " — Berni  even  could  not  keep  up 
his  spirits  ;  into  the  middle  of  Boiardo's  serene  fairy- 
land adventures  he  inserted  a  description  of  the  sack 
of  Rome  which  is  simply  harrowing.  All  real  cheer- 
fulness departed  from  the  people,  to  be  replaced  onlv 


326  EUPHORION. 

by  pleasure  in  the  debaucheries  of  the  buffoonish 
obscenity  of  Aretino,  Bandello,  and  so  forth,  to  which 
the  men  of  the  dying  Italy  of  the  Renaissance  listened 
as  the  roysterers  of  the  plague  of  Florence,  with  the 
mortal  sickness  almost  upon  them,  may  hav^e  listened 
to  the  filthy  songs  which  they  trolled  out  in  their 
drunkenness.  Or  at  best,  the  poor  starved,  bruised,, 
battered,  humiliated  nation  may  have  tried  to  be 
cheerful  on  the  principle  of  its  harlequin  playwright 
Beolco,  who,  more  honest  than  the  Ariostos  and 
Bibbienas,  and  Aretines,  came  forward  on  his  stage  of 
planks  at  Padua,  and  after  describing  the  ruin  and 
wretchedness  of  the  country,  the  sense  of  dreariness 
and  desolation,  which  made  young  folk  careless  of 
marriage,  and  the  very  nightingales  (he  thought) 
careless  of  song,  recommended  his  audience,  since 
they  could  not  even  cry  thoroughly  and  to  feel  any 
the  better  for  it,  to  laugh,  if  they  still  were  able. 
Boiardo  was  forgotten  ;  his  spirit  was  unsuited  to  the 
depression,  gloomy  brutality,  gloomy  sentimentality,. 
which  grew  every  day  as  Italy  settled  down  after  its 
Renaissance-Shrovetide  in  the  cinders  and  fasting  of 
the  long  Lent  of  Spanish  and  Jesuit  rule. 

Still  the  style  of  Boiardo  was  not  yet  exhausted ;  the 
peculiar  kind  of  fairy  epic,  the  peculiar  combination  of 
chivalric  and  classic  elements  of  which  the  "  Orlando 
Innamorato "  and  the  "  Orlando  Furioso,"  had  been 
the  great  examples,  still  fascinated  poets  and  public. 
The  Renaissance,  or  what  remained  of  it,  was  now  no 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  327 

longer  confined  to  Italy ;  it  had  spread,  paler,  more 
diluted,  shallower,  over  the  rest  of  Europe.  To  follow 
the  filiation  of  schools,  to  understand  the  intellectual 
relationships  of  individuals,  of  the  latter  half  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  it  becomes  necessary  to  move  from 
one  country  to  another.  And  thus  the  two  brother 
poets  of  the  family  of  Boiardo,  its  two  last  and  much 
saddened  representatives,  came  to  write  in  very 
different  languages  and  under  very  different  circum- 
stances. These  two  are  Tasso  and  our  own  Spenser. 
They  are  both  poets  of  the  school  of  the  "  Orlando 
Innamorato,"  both  poets  of  a  reaction,  of  a  kind  of 
purified  Renaissance :  the  one  of  the  late  Italian 
Renaissance  emasculated  by  the  Council  of  Trent  and 
by  Spain  ;  the  other  of  the  English  Renaissance,  in 
its  youth  truly,  but,  in  the  individual  case  of  Spenser, 
timidly  drawn  aside  from  the  excesses  of  buoyant  life 
around.  In  the  days  of  the  semi-atheist  dramatists, 
all  flesh  and  blood  and  democracy,  Spenser  steeps 
himself  in  Christianity  and  chivalry,  even  as  Tasso 
does,  following  on  the  fleshly  levity  and  scepticism  of 
Boiardo,  Berni,  and  Ariosto.  There  is  in  both  poets 
a  paleness,  a  certain  diaphanous  weakness,  an  absence 
of  strong  tint  or  fibre  or  perfume  ;  in  Tasso  the  pallor 
of  autumn,  in  Spenser  the  paleness  of  spring  :  autumn 
left  sad  and  leafless  by  the  too  voluptuous  heat  and 
fruitfulness  of  summer ;  spring  still  pale  and  pinched 
by  winter,  with  timid  nipped  grass  and  unripe  stiff 
buds  and  catkins,  which  never  suggest  the  tangle  of 


328  EUPHORION. 

bush,  grasses,  and  magnificent  flowers  and  fruits,  sweet, 
splendid,  or  poisonous,  which  the  sun  will  make  out 
of  them.  The  Renaissance,  in  the  past  for  Tasso,  in 
the  proximate  and  very  visible  future  for  Spenser,  has 
frightened  both  ;  the  cynicism  and  bestiality  of  men 
like  Machiavelli  and  Aretino  ;  the  godless,  muscular 
lustiness  of  Marlowe,  Greene,  and  Peele,  seen  in  a 
glimpse  by  Tasso  and  Spenser,  have  given  a  shock  to 
their  sensitive  nature,  have  made  them  turn  away  and 
hide  themselves  from  a  second  sight  of  it.  They  both 
take  refuge  in  a  land  of  fiction,  of  romance,  from  the 
realities  into  which  they  dread  to  splash  ;  a  world  un- 
substantial, diaphanous,  faint-hued,  almost  passionless, 
which  they  make  out  of  beauty  and  heroism  and 
purity,  which  they  alembicize  and  refine,  but  into 
which  there  never  enters  any  vital  element,  anything 
to  give  it  flesh  and  bone  and  pulsing  life  :  it  is  a  mere 
soap  bubble.  And  beautiful  as  is  this  world  of  their 
own  making,  it  is  too  negative  even  for  them  ;  they 
move  in  it  only  in  imagination,  calm,  serene,  vacant, 
alm.ost  sad.  There  is  in  it,  and  in  themselves,  a  some- 
thing wanting  ;  and  the  remembrance  of  that  unholy 
life  of  reality  which  jostled  and  splashed  their  delicate 
souls,  comes  back  and  haunts  them  with  its  evil 
thought.  There  is  no  laugh — what  is  worse,  no  smile 
—  in  these  men.  Incipient  puritanism,  not  yet  the 
terrible  brawny  reality  of  Bunyan,  but  a  vague,  grey 
spectre,  haunts  Spenser ;  and  the  puritanism  of  Don 
Quixote,  the   vague,  melancholy,  fantastic  reverting 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  329 

from  the  evil  world  of  to-day  to  an  impossible  world 
of  chivalry,  is  troubling  the  sight  of  Tasso.  He 
cannot  go  crazy  like  Don  Quixote,  and  instead  he 
grows  melancholy  ;  he  cannot  believe  in  his  own 
ideals ;  he  cannot  give  them  life,  any  more  than  can 
Spenser  give  life  to  his  allegoric  knights  and  ladies, 
because  the  life  would  have  to  be  fetched  by  Tasso 
out  of  the  flesh  of  Ariosto,  and  by  Spenser  out  of  the 
blood  of  Marlowe ;  and  both  Tasso  and  Spenser 
shrink  at  the  thought  of  what  might  with  it  be  in- 
oculated or  transfused  ;  and  they  rest  satisfied  with 
phantoms.  The  phantoms  of  Spenser  are  more 
shadowy,  much  more  utterly  devoid  of  human  cha- 
racter ;  they  are  almost  metaphysical  abstractions, 
and  they  do  not  therefore  sadden  us  :  they  are  too 
unlike  living  things  to  seem  very  lifeless.  But  the 
phantoms  of  Tasso,  he  would  fain  make  realities  ;  he 
works  at  every  detail  of  character,  history,  or  geo- 
graphy, which  may  make  his  people  real  ;  they  are 
not,  as  with  Spenser,  elves  and  wizards  flitting  about 
in  a  nameless  fairyland,  characterless  and  passionless  ; 
they  are  historical  creatures,  captains  and  soldiers  in 
a  country  mapped  out  by  the  geographer ;  but  they 
are  phantoms  all  the  more  melancholy,  these  beautiful 
and  heroic  Clorindas  and  Erminias  and  Tancreds 
and  Godfreys — why  .?  because  the  real  world  around 
Tasso  is  peopled  with  Brachianos  and  Corombonas, 
and  Annabellas  and  Giovannis,  creatures  for  Webster 
and  Ford  ;  and  because  this  world  of  chivalry  is,  in 


330  EUPHORION. 

his  Italy,  as  false  as  the  world  of  Amadis  and 
Esplandian  in  Toboso  and  Barcelona  for  poor  Don 
Quixote.  Melancholy  therefore,  and  dreamy,  both 
Tasso  and  Spenser,  with  nothing  they  can  fully  love 
in  reality,  because  they  see  it  tainted  with  reality  and 
evil ;  without  the  cheerful  falling  back  upon  everyday 
life  of  Ariosto  and  Shakespeare ;  and  with  a  strange 
fancy  for  fairyland,  for  the  distant,  for  the  Happy 
Islands,  the  St.  Brandan's  Isles,  the  country  of  the 
fountain  of  youth,  the  country  of  which  vague  reports 
have  come  back  with  the  ships  of  Raleigh  and  Ponce 
de  Leon.  Tasso  and  Spenser  are  happiest,  in  their 
calm,  melancholy  way,  when  they  can  let  themselves 
go  in  day-dreams,  and  talk  of  things  in  which  they  do 
not  believe,  of  diamond  shields  which  stun  monsters,. 
of  ointments  which  cure  all  ills  of  body  and  of  soul^ 
of  enchanted  groves  whose  trees  sound  with  voices 
and  lutes,  of  boats  in  which,  steered  by  fairies,  we  can 
glide  across  the  scarcely  rippled  summer  sea,  and,, 
watching  the  ruins  of  the  past,  time  and  reality  left 
behind,  set  sail  for  some  strange  land  of  bliss.  And 
there  is  in  the  very  sensuousness  and  love  of  beauty 
of  these  men  a  vagueness  and  melancholy,  a  constant 
sense  of  the  fleeting  and  of  the  eternal,  as  in  that 
passage,  translated  from  the  languidly  sweet  Italian 
perfection  of  Tasso  into  the  timid,  almost  scentless,. 
English  of  Spenser — "  Cosi  trapassa  al  trapassar  d'un 
giorno." 

So  passeth,  in  the  passing  of  a  day. 

Of  mortall  life  the  leafe,  the  bud,  the  flowro 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  331 

Ne  more  doth  florish  after  first  decay, 

That  earst  was  sought  to  deck  both  bed  and  bowre 

Of  many  a  lady,  and  many  a  Paramowre. 

Gather  therefore  the  Rose  whilest  yet  is  prime, 

For  soone  comes  age  that  will  her  pride  deflowre  ; 

Gather  the  Rose  of  love  whilest  yet  is  time, 

Whilest  loving  thou  mayest  loved  be  withe  equall  crime. 

A  sense  of  evanescence,  of  dreamlikeness,  quite  dif- 
ferent from  the  thoughtless  enjoyment  of  Boiardo, 
from  the  bold  and  manly  facing  of  the  future,  the 
solemn,  strong  sense  of  life  and  death  as  of  waking 
realities,  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  even  of  weak- 
lings like  Massinger  and  Beaumont.  In  Tasso  and  in 
Spenser  there  is  no  such  joyousness,  no  such  solemnity ; 
only  a  dreamy  watching,  a  regret  which  is  scarcely  a 
regret,  at  the  evanescence  of  pale  beauty  and  pale  life, 
of  joys  feebly  felt  and  evils  meekly  borne. 

With  Tasso  and  Spenser  comes  to  a  close  the  school 
of  Boiardo,  the  small  number  of  real  artists  who  finally 
gave  an  enduring  and  beautiful  shape  to  that  strangely 
mixed  and  altered  material  of  romantic  epic  left  behind 
by  the  Middle  Ages  ;  comes  to  an  end  at  least  till 
our  own  day  of  appreciative  and  deliberate  imitation 
and  selection  and  rearrangement  of  the  artistic  forms 
of  the  past.  Until  the  revival  (after  much  study  and 
criticism)  by  our  own  poets  of  Arthur  and  Gudrun  and 
the  Fortunate  Isles,  the  world  had  had  enough  of 
mediaeval  romance.  Chivalry  had  avowedly  ended  in 
chamberlainry  ;  the  devotion  to  women  in  the  official 
routine  of  the  cicisbeo  ;  the  last  romance  to  which  thf^ 


332  EUPHORION. 

late  Renaissance  had  clung,  which  made  it  sympathize 
with  Huon,  Ogier,  Orlando,  and  Rinaldo,  which  had 
made  it  take  delight  still  in  the  fairyland  of  Oberon, 
of  Fallerina,  of  Alcina,  of  Armida,  of  Acrasia,  the 
romance  of  the  new  world,  had  also  turned  into  prose, 
prose  of  blood-stained  filth.  The  humanistic  and 
rationalistic  men  of  the  Renaissance  had  doubtless 
early  begun  to  turn  up  their  noses  in  dainty  dilettantism 
or  scientific  contempt,  at  what  were  later  to  be  called 
by  Montaigne,  "  Ces  Lancelots  du  Lac,  ces  Amadis, 
ces  Huons  et  tels  fatras  di  livres  a  quoy  I'enfance 
s'amuse  ; "  and  by  Ben  Jonson  : 

Public  nothings, 
Abortives  of  the  fabulous  dark  cloister, 
Sent  out  to  poison  courts,  and  infect  manners — 

the  public  at  large  was  more  constant,  and  still  retained 
a  love  for  mediaeval  romance.  But  more  than  hu- 
manities, more  than  scientific  scepticism  and  religious 
puritanism,  did  the  slow  dispelling  of  the  illusion  of 
Eldorado  and  the  Fortunate  Isles.  Mankind  set  sail 
for  America  in  brilliant  and  knightly  gear,  believing 
in  fountains  of  youth  and  St.  Brandan's  Isles,  with 
Ariosto,  Tasso,  and  Spenser  still  in  its  pockets.  It 
returns  from  America  either  as  the  tattered  fever- 
stricken  ruffian,  or  as  the  vulgar,  fat  upstart  of  Spanish 
comedy,  returns  without  honour  or  shame,  holding 
money  (and  next  to  money,  negroes)  of  greater  account 
than  any  insignia  of  paladinship  or  the  Round  Table  ; 
it  is  brutal,  vulgar,  cynical  ;  at  best  very  sad,  and  it 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  BOIARDO.  333 

gets  written  for  its  delectation  the  comic- tragic  novels 
of  rapscallions,  panders,  prostitutes,  and  card-sharpers, 
which,  from  "  Lazarillo  de  Tormes "  to  "  Gil  Bias," 
and  from  "  Gil  Bias  "  to  "Tom  Jones,"  finally  replace 
the  romances  of  the  Launcelots,  Galahads,  Rinaldos, 
and  Orlandos. 


Thus  did  the  mediaeval  romantic-epic  stuffs  suffer 
alteration,  adulteration,  and  loss  of  character,  through- 
out the  long  period  of  the  Middle  Ages,  without  ever 
receiving  an  artistic  shape,  such  as  should  make  all 
men  preserve  and  cherish  them  for  the  only  thing 
which  makes  men  preserve  and  cherish  such  things — 
that  never  to  be  wasted  quality,  beauty.  The  Middle 
Ages  were  powerless  to  endow  therewith  their  own 
subjects  ;  so  the  subjects  had  to  wait,  altering  more 
and  more  with  every  passing  day,  till  the  coming  of 
the  Renaissance.  And  by  that  time  these  subjects 
had  ceased  to  have  any  serious  meaning  whatever; 
the  Roland  of  the  song  of  Roncevaux  had  become  the 
crazy  Orlando  of  Ariosto  ;  the  Renaud  of  the  "  Quatre 
Fils  Aymon,"  had  become  the  Rinaldo,  thrashed 
with  sheaves  of  lilies  by  Cupid,  of  Matteo  Boiardo. 
The  Renaissance  took  up  the  old  epic-romantic 
materials  and  made  out  of  them  works  of  art ;  but 
works  of  art  which,  as  I  said  before,  were  playthings. 


MEDIAEVAL   LOVE. 


MEDI/EVAL  LOVE. 


On  laying  down  the  "Vita  Nuova"  our  soul  is  at  first 
filled  and  resounding  with  the  love  of  Beatrice, 
Whatever  habits  or  capacities  of  noble  loving  may- 
lurk  within  ourselves,  have  been  awakened  by  the 
solemn  music  of  this  book,  and  have  sung  in  unison 
with  Dante's  love  till  we  have  ceased  to  hear  the  voice 
of  his  passion  and  have  heard  only  the  voice  of  our 
own.  When  the  excitement  has  diminished,  when 
we  have  grown  able  to  separate  from  our  own  feelings 
the  feelings  of  the  man  dead  these  five  centuries  and 
a  half,  and  to  realize  the  strangeness,  the  obsoleteness 
of  this  love  which  for  a  moment  had  seemed  our  love  ; 
then  a  new  phase  of  impressions  has  set  in,  and  the 
"  Vita  Nuova  "  inspires  us  with  mere  passionate  awe  : 
awe  before  this  passion  which  we  feel  to  be  no  longer 
our  own,  but  far  above  and  distant  from  us,  as  in  some 
rarer  stratum  of  atmosphere  ;  awe  before  this  woman 
who  creates  it,  or  rather  who  is  its  creation.     Even  as 


338  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

Dante  fancied  that  the  people  of  Florence  did  when 
the  bodily  presence  of  this  lady  came  across  their 
path,  so  do  we  cast  down  our  glance  as  the  image  of 
Beatrice  passes  across  our  mind.  Nay,  the  glory  of 
her,  felt  so  really  while  reading  the  few,  meagre  words 
in  the  book,  is  stored  away  in  our  heart,  and  clothes 
with  a  faint  aureole  the  lady — if  ever  in  our  life  we 
chance  to  meet  her — in  whom,  though  Dante  tells  us 
nothing  of  stature,  features,  eyes  or  hair,  we  seem  to 
recognize  a  likeness  to  her  on  whose  passage  "  ogni 
lingua  divien  tremando  muta,  e  gli  occhi  non  ardiscon 
di  guardare."  Passion  like  this,  to  paraphrase  a  line 
of  Rossetti's,  is  genius  ;  and  it  arouses  in  such  as  look 
upon  it  the  peculiar  sense  of  wonder  and  love,  of  awe- 
stricken  raising  up  of  him  who  contemplates,  which 
accompanies  the  contemplation  of  genius. 

But  it  may  be  that  one  day  we  feel,  instead  of  this, 
wonder  indeed,  but  wonder  mingled  with  doubt. 
This  ideal  love,  which  craves  for  no  union  with  its 
object  ;  which  seeks  merely  to  see,  nay,  which  is  satis- 
fied with  mere  thinking  on  the  beloved  one,  will  strike 
us  with  the  cold  and  barren  glitter  of  the  miraculous. 
This  Beatrice,  as  we  gaze  on  her,  will  prove  to  be  no 
reality  of  flesh  and  blood  like  ourselves  ;  she  is  a  form 
modelled  in  the  semblance  of  that  real,  living  woman 
who  died  six  centuries  ago,  but  the  substance  of  which 
is  the  white  fire  of  Dante's  love.  And  the  thought 
will  arise  that  this  purely  intellectual  love  of  a  scarce- 
noticed  youth  for  a  scarce-known  woman  is  a  thing 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  339 

which  does  not  belong  to  life,  neither  sweetening  nor 
ennobling  any  of  its  real  relations  ;  that  it  is,  in  its 
•dazzling  purity  and  whiteness,  in  fact  a  mere  strange 
and  sterile  death  light,  such  as  could  not  and  should 
not,  in  this  world  of  ours,  exist  twice  over.  And,  lest  we 
should  ever  be  tempted  to  think  of  this  ideal  love  for 
Beatrice  as  of  a  wonderful  and  beautiful,  but  scarcely 
natural  or  useful  phenomenon,  I  would  wish  to  study 
the  story  of  its  origin  and  its  influence.  I  would  wish 
to  show  that  had  it  not  burned  thus  strangely  con- 
centrated and  pure,  the  poets  of  succeeding  ages  could 
not  have  taken  from  that  white  flame  of  love  which 
Dante  set  alight  upon  the  grave  of  Beatrice,  the  spark 
of  ideal  passion  which  has,  in  the  noblest  of  our 
literature,  made  the  desire  of  man  for  woman  and  of 
woman  for  man  burn  clear  towards  heaven,  leaving 
behind  the  noisome  ashes  and  soul-enervating  vapours 
of  earthly  lust. 

I. 

The  centuries  have  made  us  ;  forcing  us  into  new 
practices,  teaching  us  new  habits,  creating  for  us  new 
capacities  and  wants ;  adding,  ever  and  anon,  to  the 
soul  organism  of  mankind  features  which  at  first  were 
but  accidental  peculiarities,  which  became  little  by 
little  qualities  deliberately  sought  for  and  at  length 
inborn  and  hereditary  characteristics.  And  thus,  in 
what  we  call  the  Middle  Ages,  there  was  invented  by 
the  stress  of  circumstances,  elaborated  by  half-con- 


340  EUPHORION. 

scious  effort  and  bequeathed  as  an  unalienable  habit, 
a  new  manner  of  loving. 

The  women  of  classical  Antiquity  appear  to  us  in 
poetry  and  imaginative  literature  as  one  of  two  things  : 
the  wife  or  the  mistress.  The  wife,  Penelope,  Andro- 
mache, Alkestis,  nay,  even  the  charming  young  bride 
in  Xenophon's  "  GEconomics,"  is,  while  excluded  from 
many  concerns,  distinctly  reverenced  and  loved  in  her 
own  household  capacity ;  but  the  reverence  is  of  the 
sort  which  the  man  feels  for  his  parents  and  his  house- 
hold gods,  and  the  affection  is  calm  and  gently 
rebuking  like  that  for  his  children.  The  mistress,  on 
the  other  hand,  is  the  object  of  passion  which  is  often 
very  vehement,  but  which  is  always  either  simply 
fleshly  or  merely  fancifully  aesthetic  or  both,  and  which 
entirely  precludes  any  save  a  degrading  influence  upon 
the  sensual  and  suspicious  lover.  Even  Tibullus,  in 
love  matters  one  of  the  most  modern  among  the 
ancients,  and  capable  of  painting  many  charming  and 
delicate  little  domestic  idyls  even  in  connection  with 
a  mere  bought  mistress,  is  perpetually  accusing  his 
Delia  of  selling  herself  to  a  higher  bidder,  and  sighing 
at  the  high  probability  of  her  abandoning  him  for  the 
lUyrian  praetor  or  some  other  rich  amateur  of  pretty 
women.  The  barbarous  North — whose  songs  have 
come  down  to  us  either,  like  the  Volsunga  Saga 
translated  by  Mr.  Morris,  in  an  original  pagan  version, 
or  else,  as  the  Nibelungenlied,  recast  during  the 
early  Middle  Ages — the  North  tells  us  nothing  of  the 


MEDL^VAL  LOVE.  341 

venal  paramour,  but  knows  nothing  also  beyond  the 
wedded  wife;  more  independent  and  mighty  perhaps 
than  her  counterpart  of  classical  Antiquity,  but 
although  often  bought,  like  Brynhilt  or  Gudrun,  at 
the  expense  of  tremendous  adventures,  cherished 
scarcely  more  passionately  than  the  wives  of  Odysseus 
and  Hector.  Thus,  before  the  Middle  Ages,  there 
existed  as  a  rule  only  a  holy,  but  indifferent  and 
utterly  unlyrical,  love  for  the  women,  the  equals  of 
their  husbands,  wooed  usually  of  the  family  and 
solemnly  given  in  marriage  without  much  consultation 
of  their  wishes  ;  and  a  highly  passionate  and  singing, 
but  completely  profligate  and  debasing,  desire  for 
mercenary  though  cultivated  creatures  like  the  Delias 
and  Cynthias  of  Tibullus  and  Propertius,  or  highborn 
women,  descended,  like  Catullus' Lesbia,  in  brazen  dis- 
honour to  their  level,  women  towards  whom  there  could 
not  possibly  exist  on  the  part  of  their  lovers  any  sense 
of  equality,  much  less  of  inferiority.  To  these  two 
kinds  of  love,  chaste  but  cold,  and  passionate  but 
unchaste,  the  Middle  Ages  added,  or  rather  opposed, 
a  new  manner  of  loving,  which,  although  a  mere 
passing  phenomenon,  has  left  the  clearest  traces 
throughout  our  whole  mode  of  feeling  and  writing. 

To  describe  mediaeval  love  is  a  difficult  matter,  and 
to  describe  it  except  in  negations  is  next  to  impossi- 
bility. I  conceive  it  to  consist  in  a  certain  sentimental, 
romantic,  idealistic  attitude  towards  women,  not  by 
any  means  incompatible  however  with  the  grossest 


342  EUPHORION. 

animalism  ;  an  attitude  presupposing  a  complete 
moral,  aesthetical,  and  social  superiority  on  the  part  of 
the  whole  sex,  inspiring  the  very  highest  respect  and 
admiration  independently  of  the  individual's  qualities  % 
and  reaching  the  point  of  actual  worship,  varying 
from  the  adoration  of  a  queen  by  a  courtier  to  the 
adoration  of  a  shrine  by  a  pilgrim,  in  the  case  of  the 
one  particular  lady  who  happens  to  be  the  beloved  ; 
an  attitude  in  the  relations  of  the  sexes  which  results 
in  love  becoming  an  indispensable  part  of  a  noble  life, 
and  the  devoted  attachment  to  one  individual  woman 
a  necessary  requisite  of  a  gentlemanly  training. 

Mediaeval  love  is  not  merely  a  passion,  a  desire,  an 
affection,  a  habit ;  it  is  a  perfect  occupation.  It 
absorbs,  or  is  supposed  to  absorb,  the  individual  ;  it 
permeates  his  life  like  a  religion.  It  is  not  one  of  the 
interests  of  life,  or,  rather,  one  of  life's  phases  ;  it  is 
the  whole  of  life,  all  other  interests  and  actions  either 
sinking  into  an  unsingable  region  below  it,  or  merely 
embroidering  a  variegated  pattern  upon  its  golden 
background.  Mediaeval  love,  therefore,  never  obtains 
its  object,  however  much  it  may  obtain  the  woman  ; 
for  the  object  of  mediseval  love,  as  of  mediaeval  reli- 
gious mysticism,  is  not  one  particular  act  or  series  of 
acts,  but  is  its  own  exercise,  of  which  the  various  inci- 
dents of  the  drama  between  man  and  woman  are 
merely  so  many  results.  It  has  not  its  definite  stages, 
like  the  love  of  the  men  of  classical  Antiquity  or  the 
heroic  time  of  the  North  :  its  stages  of  seeking,  obtain- 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  345 

ing,  cherishing,  guarding  ;  it  is  ahvays  at  the  same 
point,  always  in  the  same  condition  of  half-religious, 
half-courtier-like  adoration,  whether  it  be  triumphantly 
successful  or  sighingly  despairing.  The  man  and 
the  woman — or  rather,  I  should  say,  the  knight  and 
the  lady,  for  mediaeval  love  is  an  aristocratic  pri- 
ilege,  and  the  love  of  lower  folk  is  not  a  theme  for 
ng — the  knight  and  the  lady,  therefore,  seem 
ways,  however  knit  together  by  habit,  nay,  by  inex- 
icable  meshes  of  guilt,  somehow  at  the  same  distance 
from  one  another.  Once  they  have  seen  and  loved 
each  other,  their  passion  burns  on  always  evenly,, 
burns  on  (at  least  theoretically)  to  all  eternity.  It 
seems  almost  as  if  the  woman  were  a  mere  shrine,  a 
mysterious  receptacle  of  the  ineffable,  a  grail  cup,  a 
consecrated  wafer,  but  not  the  ineffable  itself.  For 
there  is  always  in  mediaeval  love,  however  fleshly 
the  incidents  which  it  produces,  a  certain  Platonic 
element ;  that  is  to  say,  a  craving  for,  a  pursuit  of, 
something  which  is  an  abstraction  ;  an  abstraction 
impossible  to  define  in  its  constant  shifting  and  shim- 
mering, and  which  seems  at  one  moment  a  social 
standard,  a  religious  ideal,  or  both,  and  which  merges 
for  ever  in  the  dazzling,  vague  sheen  of  the  Eternal 
Feminine.  Hence,  one  of  the  most  distinctive  features 
of  mediaeval  love,  an  extraordinary  sameness  of  into- 
nation, making  it  difficult  to  distinguish  between  the 
bond  fide  passion  for  which  a  man  risks  life  and  honour, 
and  the   mere  conventional  gallantry  of  the  knight 


344  EUPHORION. 

who  sticks  a  lady's  glove  on  his  helmet  as  a  compli- 
ment to  her  rank  ;  nay,  between  the  impure  adoration 
of  an  adulterous  lamia  like  Yseult,  and  the  mystical 
adoration  of  a  glorified  Mother  of  God  ;  for  both  are 
women,  both  are  ladies,  and  therefore  the  greatest 
poet  of  the  early  Middle  Ages,  Gottfried  von  Strass- 
burg,  sings  them  both  with  the  same  religious  respect, 
and  the  same  hysterical  rapture.  This  mediaeval  love 
is  furthermore  a  deliberately  expected,  sought-for,  and 
received  necessity  in  a  man's  life  ;  it  is  not  an  acci- 
dent, much  less  an  incidental  occurrence  to  be  lightly 
taken  or  possibly  avoided  :  it  is  absolutely  indispen- 
sable to  man's  social  training,  to  his  moral  and 
aesthetical  self-improvement;  it  is  part  and  parcel  of 
manhood  and  knighthood.  Hence,  where  it  does  not 
arise  of  itself  (and  where  a  man  is  full  of  the  notion  of 
such  love,  it  is  rare  that  it  does  not  come  but  too 
soon)  it  has  to  be  sought  for.  Ulrich  von  Liechten- 
stein, in  his  curious  autobiography  written  late  in  the 
twelfth  century,  relates  how  ever  since  his  childhood 
he  had  been  aware  of  the  necessity  of  the  loyal  love 
service  of  a  lady  for  the  accomplishment  of  knightly 
duties ;  and  how,  as  soon  as  he  was  old  enough  to  love, 
he  looked  around  him  for  a  lady  whom  he  might 
serve  ;  a  proceeding  renewed  in  more  prosaic  days 
and  with  a  curious  pedantic  smack,  by  Lorenzo  dei 
Medici  ;  and  then  again,  perhaps  for  the  last  time,  by 
the  Knight  of  La  Mancha,  in  that  memorable  discus- 
sion which  ended  in  the  enthronement  as  his  heart's 


MEDIAEVAL  LOVE.  345 

•queen  of  the  unrivalled  Dulcinea  of  Toboso.  Froivoi- 
dienst,  "  lady's  service,"  is  the  name  given  by  Ulrich 
von  Liechtenstein,  a  medijeval  Quixote,  outshining  by 
far  the  mad  Provencals  Rudel  and  Vidal,to  the  memoirs 
very  delightfully  done  into  modern  German  by  Lud- 
wig  Tieck  ;  and  "  lady's  service  "  is  the  highest  occupa- 
tion of  knightly  leisure,  the  subject  of  the  immense 
bulk  of  mediaeval  poetry.  "  Lady's  service  "  in  deeds  of 
arms  and  song,  in  constant  praise  and  defence  of  the 
beloved,  in  heroic  enterprise  and  madcap  mummery, 
in  submission  and  terror  to  the  wondrous  creature 
whom  the  humble  servant,  the  lover,  never  calls  by 
her  sacred  name,  speaking  of  her  in  words  unknown 
to  Antiquity,  dovipna,  daj?ie,  froive,  madonna — words 
of  which  the  original  sense  has  almost  been  forgotten, 
although  there  cleave  to  them  even  now  ideas  higher 
than  those  associated  with  Xht  puella  of  the  ancients, 
the  zuib  of  the  heroic  days — lady,  mistress — the  titles 
of  the  Mother  of  God,  who  is,  after  all,  only  the  mysti- 
cal Soul's  Paramour  of  the  mediaeval  world.  "  Lady's 
service  " — the  almost  technical  word,  expressing  the 
position,  half-serf-like,  half-religious,  the  bonds  of 
complete  humility  and  never-ending  faithfulness,  the 
hopes  of  reward,  the  patience  under  displeasure,  the 
pride  in  the  livery  of  servitude,  the  utter  absorption  of 
the  life  of  one  individual  in  the  life  of  another  ;  which 
constitute  in  Provence,  in  France,  in  Germany,  in 
England,  in  Italy,  in  the  fabulous  kingdom.s  of 
-Arthur  and  Charlemagne,  the  strange  new  thing 
-which  I  have  named  Mediaeval  Love. 


346  EUPHORION. 

Has  such  a  thing  really  existed  ?  Are  not  these 
mediaeval  poets  leagued  together  in  a  huge  conspiracy 
to  deceive  us  ?  Is  it  possible  that  strong  men  have 
wept  and  fainted  at  a  mere  woman's  name,  like  the 
Count  of  Nevers  in  "  Flamenca,"  or  that  their  mind 
has  swooned  away  in  months  of  reverie  like  that  of 
Parzifal  in  Eschenbach's  poem  ;  that  worldly  wise  and 
witty  men  have  shipped  off  and  died  on  sea  for  love 
of  an  unseen  woman  like  Jaufre  Rudel;  or  dressed  in 
wolfs  hide  and  lurked  and  fled  before  the  huntsmen 
like  Peire  Vidal  ;  or  mangled  their  face  and  cut  off 
their  finger,  and,  clothing  themselves  in  rags  more 
frightful  than  Nessus'  robe,  mixed  in  the  untouchable 
band  of  lepers  like  Ulrich  von  Liechtenstein  ?  Is  it 
possible  to  believe  that  the  insane  enterprises  of  the 
Amadises,  Lisvarts  and  Felixmartes  of  late  medieval 
romance,  that  the  behaviour  of  Don  Quixote  in  the 
Sierra  Morena,  ever  had  any  serious  models  in  reality  ? 
Nay,  more  difficult  still  to  believe — because  the  whole 
madness  of  individuals  is  more  credible  than  the  half- 
madness  of  the  whole  world — is  it  possible  to  believe 
that,  as  the  poems  of  innumerable  trouveres  and 
troubadours,  minnesingers  and  Italian  poets,  as  the 
legion  of  mediaeval  romiances  of  the  cycles  of  Charle- 
magne, Arthur,  and  Amadis  would  have  it,  that  during 
so  long  a  period  of  time  society  could  have  been 
enthralled  by  this  hysterical,  visionary,  artificial,  in- 
credible religion  of  mediceval  love  ?  It  is  at  once  too 
grotesque  and  too  beautiful,  too  high  and  too  low,  to^ 


MEDLEVAL  LOVE.  347 

be  credible ;  and  our  first  impulse,  on  closing  the 
catechisms  and  breviaries,  the  legendaries  and  hymn- 
books  of  this  strange  new  creed,  is  to  protest  that  the 
love  poems  must  be  allegories,  the  love  romances 
solar  myths,  the  Courts  of  Love  historical  bungles ; 
that  all  this  mediaeval  world  of  love  is  a  figment,  a 
misinterpretation,  a  falsehood. 

But  if  we  seek  more  than  a  mere  casual  impression  ; 
if,  instead  of  feeling  sceptical  over  one  or  two  frag- 
ments of  evidence,  we  attempt  to  collect  the  largest 
possible  number  of  facts  together  ;  if  we  read  not  one 
mediaeval  love  story,  but  twenty — not  half  a  dozen 
mediaeval  love  poems,  but  several  scores  ;  if  we 
really  investigate  into  the  origin  of  the  apparent  myth, 
the  case  speedily  alters.  Little  by  little  this  which  had 
been  inconceivable  becomes  not  merely  intelligible, 
but  inevitable ;  the  myth  becomes  an  historical  phe- 
nomenon of  the  most  obvious  and  necessary  sort. 
Mediaeval  love,  which  had  seemed  to  us  a  poetic  fiction, 
is  turned  into  a  reality  ;  and  a  reality,  alas,  which  is 
prosaic.     Let  us  look  at  it. 

Mediaeval  love  is  first  revealed  in  the  sudden  and 
almost  simultaneous  burst  of  song  which,  like  the 
twitter  and  trill  so  dear  to  trouveres,  troubadours,  and 
minnesingers,  fills  the  woods  that  yesterday  were 
silent  and  dead,  and  greeted  the  earliest  sunshine, 
the  earliest  faint  green  after  the  long  winter  numbness 
of  the  dark  ages,  after  the  boisterous  gales  of  the 
earliest  Crusade.     The  French  and  Provencals  sane 


348  EUPHORION. 

first,  the  Germans  later,  the  Sicilians  last ;  but  al- 
though we  may  say  after  deliberate  analysis,  such 
or  such  a  form,  or  such  or  such  a  story,  was  known 
in  this  country  before  it  appeared  in  that  one,  all 
imitation  or  suggestion  was  so  rapid  that  with  regard 
to  the  French,  the  Provengals,  and  the  Germans  at 
least,  the  impression  is  simultaneous  ;  only  the  Sicilians 
beginning  distinctly  later,  forerunners  of  the  new  love 
lyric,  wholly  different  from  that  of  trouveres,  trouba- 
dours, and  minnesingers,  of  the  Italians  of  the  latter 
thirteenth  century.  And  this  simultaneous  revelation 
of  mediaeval  love  takes  place  in  the  last  quarter 
of  the  twelfth  century,  when  Northern  France  had 
already  consolidated  into  a  powerful  monarchy,  and 
Paris,  after  the  teachings  of  Abelard,  was  recognized 
as  the  intellectual  metropolis  of  Europe  ;  when  south 
of  the  Loire  the  brilliant  Angevine  kings  held  the 
overlordship  of  the  cultured  Raymonds  of  Toulouse 
and  of  the  reviving  Latin  municipalities  of  Provence  ; 
when  Germany  was  welded  as  a  compact  feudal  mass 
by  the  most  powerful  of  the  Stauffens  ;  and  the  papacy 
had  been  built  up  by  Gregory  and  Alexander  into 
a  political  wall  against  which  Frederick  and  Henry 
vainly  battered  ;  when  the  Italian  commonwealths 
grew  slowly  but  surely,  as  yet  still  far  from  guessing 
that  the  day  would  come  when  their  democracy  should 
produce  a  new  civilization  to  supersede  this  trium- 
phant mediaeval  civilization  of  the  early  Capetiens,  the 
Angevines,    and   the    Hohenstauffens.      Europe    was 


MEDL^VAL  LOVE.  34^ 

setting  forth  once  more  for  the  East ;  but  no  longer 
as  the  ignorant  and  enthusiastic  hordes  of  Peter  the 
Hermit  :  Asia  was  the  great  field  for  adventure,  the 
great  teacher  of  new  luxuries,  at  once  the  Eldorado 
and  the  grand  tour  of  all  the  brilliant  and  inquisitive 
and  unscrupulous  chivalry  of  the  day.  And,  while 
into  the  West  were  insidiously  entering  habits  and 
modes  of  thought  of  the  East ;  throughout  Germany 
and  Provence,  and  throughout  the  still  obscure  free 
burghs  of  Italy,  was  spreading  the  first  indication  of 
that  emotional  mysticism  which,  twenty  or  thirty 
years  later,  was  to  burst  out  in  the  frenzy  of  spiritual 
love  of  St.  Francis  and  his  followers.  The  moment 
is  one  of  the  most  remarkable  in  all  history :  the 
premature  promise  in  the  twelfth  century  of  that 
intellectual  revival  which  was  delayed  throughout 
Northern  Europe  until  the  sixteenth.  It  is  the  mo- 
ment when  society  settled  down,  after  the  anarchy 
of  eight  hundred  years,  on  its  feudal  basis  ;  a  basis 
fallaciously  solid,  and  in  whose  presence  no  one  might 
guess  that  the  true  and  definitive  Renaissance  would 
arise  out  of  the  democratic  civilization  of  Italy. 

Such  is  the  moment  when  we  first  hear  the  almost 
universal  song  of  mediaeval  love.  This  song  comes 
from  the  triumphantly  reorganized  portion  of  society, 
not  from  the  part  which  is  slowly  working  its  way  to 
reorganization ;  not  from  the  timidly  encroaching 
burghers,  but  from  the  nobles.  The  reign  of  town 
poetry,  of  fabliaux  and  meistersang,  comes  later ;  the 


3SO  EUPH  ORION. 

poets  of  the  early  Middle  Ages,  trouveres,  troubadours, 
and  minnesingers  are,  with  barely  one  or  two  excep- 
tions, all  knights.  And  their  song  comes  from  the 
castle.  Now,  in  order  to  understand  mediaeval  love, 
we  must  reflect  for  a  moment  upon  this  feudal  castle, 
and  upon  the  kind  of  life  which  the  love  poets  of  the 
late  twelfth  and  early  thirteenth  century — whether 
lords  like  Bertram  de  Born,  and  Guillaumc  de  Poitiers, 
among  the  troubadours ;  the  Vidame  de  Chartres,  Meu- 
risses  de  Craon,  and  the  Duke  of  Brabant  among  the 
trouveres  of  Northern  France  ;  like  Ulrich  von  Liech- 
tenstein among  the  minnesingers  ;  or  retainers  and 
hangers-on  like  Bernard  de  Ventadour  and  Armand 
de  Mareulh,  like  Chrestiens  de  Troyes,  Gaisses  Brulez, 
or  Ouienes  de  Bethune,  like  Walther,  Wolfram,  and 
Tannhauser — great  or  small,  good  or  bad,  saw  before 
them  and  mixed  with  in  that  castle.  The  castle  of  a 
great  feudatory  of  the  early  Middle  Ages,  whether 
north  or  south  of  the  Loire,  in  Austria  or  in  Fran- 
conia,  is  like  a  miniature  copy  of  some  garrison  town 
in  barbarous  countries.  There  is  an  enormous  nu- 
merical preponderance  of  men  over  women  ;  for  only 
the  chiefs  in  command,  the  overlord,  and  perhaps  one  or 
two  of  his  principal  kinsmen  or  adjutants,  are  per- 
mitted the  luxury  of  a  wife  ;  the  rest  of  the  gentlemen 
are  subalterns,  younger  sons  without  means,  youths 
sent  to  learn  their  military  duty  and  the  ways 
of  the  world  :  a  whole  pack  of  men  without  wives, 
without   homes,  and  usually  without  fortune.     High 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  351 

above  all  this  deferential  male  crowd,  moves  the  lady 
of  the  castle  :  highborn,  proud,  having  brought  her 
husband  a  dower  of  fiefs  often  equal  to  his  own,  and 
of  vassals  devoted  to  her  race.  About  her  she  has 
no  equals  ;  her  daughters,  scarcely  out  of  the  nurse's 
hands,  are  given  away  in  marriage  ;  and  her  com- 
panions, if  companions  they  may  be  called,  are  the 
waiting  ladies,  poor  gentlewomen  situated  between 
the  maid  of  honour  and  the  ladies'  maid,  like  that 
Brangvvaine  whom  Yseult  sacrifices  to  her  intrigue  with 
Tristram,  or  those  damsels  whom  Flamenca  gives 
over  to  the  squires  of  her  lover  Guillems  ;  at  best, 
the  wife  of  one  of  her  husband's  subalterns,  or  some 
sister  or  aunt  or  widow  kept  by  charity.  Round  this 
lady — the  stately,  proud  lady  perpetually  described 
by  mediaeval  poets — flutters  the  swarm  of  young  men, 
all  day  long,  in  her  path :  serving  her  at  meals, 
guarding  her  apartments,  nay,  as  pages,  admitted 
even  into  her  most  secret  chamber  ;  meeting  her  for 
ever  in  the  narrowness  of  that  castle  life,  where  every 
unnecessary  woman  is  a  burden  usurping  the  place 
■of  a  soldier,  and,  if  possible,  replaced  by  a  man. 
Servants,  lacqueys,  and  enjoying  the  privileges  of 
ubiquity  of  lacqueys,  yet,  at  the  same  time,  men  of 
good  birth  and  high  breeding,  good  at  the  sword  and 
at  the  lute ;  bound  to  amuse  this  highborn  woman, 
fading  away  in  the  monotony  of  feudal  life,  with 
i^\x  books  to  read  or  unable  to  read  them,  and  far 
above  all  the  household  concerns  which  devolve  on 


35  2  EUPHORION. 

the  butler,  the  cellarer,  the  steward,  the  gentleman 
honourably  employed  as  a  servant.  To  them,  to  these 
young  men,  with  few  or  no  young  women  of  their  own 
age  with  whom  to  associate,  and  absolutely  no  un- 
married girls  who  could  be  a  desirable  match,  the  lady 
of  the  castle  speedilybecomes  a  goddess,  the  impersona- 
tion at  once  of  that  feudal  superiority  before  which  they 
bow,  of  that  social  perfection  which  they  are  com- 
manded to  seek,  and  of  that  womankind  of  which  the 
castle  affords  so  few  examples.  To  please  her,  this  lazy, 
bored,  highbred  woman,  with  all  the  squeamishness 
and  caprice  of  high  birth  and  laziness  about  her, 
becomes  their  ideal ;  to  be  favourably  noticed,  their 
highest  glory ;  to  be  loved,  these  wretched  mortals,, 
by  this  divinity — that  thought  must  often  pass 
through  their  brain  and  terrify  them  with  its  delicious 
audacity ;  oh  no,  such  a  thing  is  not  possible.  But  it 
is.  The  lady  at  first,  perhaps  most  often,  singles  out 
as  a  pastime  some  young  knight,  some  squire,  some 
page ;  and,  in  a  half-queenly,  half-motherly  way, 
corrects,  rebukes  his  deficiencies,  undertakes  to  teach 
him  his  duty  as  a  servant.  The  romance  of  the 
"  Petit  Jehan  de  Saintre,"  written  in  the  fifteenth 
century,  but  telling,  with  a  delicacy  of  cynicism  worthy 
of  Balzac,  what  must  have  been  the  old,  old  story  of 
the  whole  feudal  Middle  Ages,  shows  the  manner  in 
which,  while  feeling  that  he  is  being  trained  to  knightly 
courtesy  and  honour,  the  young  man  in  the  service  of 
a  great  feudal  lady  is  gradually  taught  dissimulation, 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  353 

lying,  Intrigue  ;  is  initiated  by  the  woman  who  looms 
above  him  like  a  saint  into  all  the  foulness  of  adultery. 
Adultery ;  a  very  ugly  word,  which  must  strike 
almost  like  a  handful  of  mud  in  the  face  whosoever 
has  approached  this  subject  of  mediaeval  love  in 
admiration  of  its  strange  delicacy  and  enthusiasm. 
Yet  it  is  a  word  which  must  be  spoken,  for  in  it  is 
the  explanation  of  the  whole  origin  and  character  of 
this  passion  which  burst  into  song  in  the  early  Middle 
Ages.  This  almost  religious  love,  this  love  which 
conceives  no  higher  honour  than  the  service  of  the 
beloved,  no  higher  virtue  than  eternal  fidelity — this 
love  is  the  love  for  another  man's  wife.  Between  un- 
married young  men  and  young  women,  kept  carefully 
apart  by  the  system  which  gives  away  a  girl  without 
her  consent  and  only  to  a  rich  suitor,  there  is  no 
possibility  of  love  in  these  early  feudal  courts  ;  the 
amours,  however  licentious,  between  kings'  daughters 
and  brave  knights,  of  the  Carolingian  tales,  belong  to 
a  different  rank  of  society,  to  the  prose  romances  made 
up  in  the  fourteenth  century  for  the  burgesses  of 
cities  ;  the  intrigues,  ending  in  marriage,  of  the  princes 
and  princesses  of  the  cycle  of  Amadis,  belong  to  a 
different  period,  to  the  fifteenth  century,  and  to  courts 
where  feudal  society  scarcely  exists  ;  the  squires,  the 
young  knights  who  hang  about  a  great  baronial  estab- 
lishment of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries,  have 
still  to  make  their  fortune,  and  do  not  dream  of  mar- 
riage.   The  husband,  on  the  other  hand,  the  great  lord 

24 


354  EUPHORION. 

or  successful  knightly  adventurer,  married  late  in  life, 
and  married  from  the  necessity,  for  ever  pressing  upon 
the  feudal  proprietor,  of  adding  on  new  fiefs  and  new 
immunities,  of  increasing  his  importance  and  inde- 
pendence in  proportion  to  the  hourly  increasing 
strength  and  claims  of  the  overlord,  the  king,  who 
casts  covetous  eyes  upon  him — the  husband  has  not 
married  for  love  ;  he  has  had  his  love  affairs  with  the 
wives  of  other  men  in  his  day,  or  may  still  have 
them  ;  this  lady  is  a  mere  feudal  necessity,  she  is 
required  to  give  him  a  dower  and  give  him  an  heir, 
that  is  all.  If  the  husband  does  not  love,  how  much 
less  can  the  wife  ;  married,  as  she  is,  scarce  knowing 
what  marriage  is,  to  a  man  much  older  than  herself, 
whom  most  probably  she  has  never  seen,  to  whom 
she  is  a  mere  investment.  Nay,  there  is  not  even  the 
after-marriage  love  of  the  ancients :  this  wife  is  not 
the  housekeeper,  the  woman  who  works  that  the  man's 
house  may  be  rich  and  decorous  ;  not  even  the  nurse 
of  his  children,  for  the  children  are  speedily  given  over 
to  the  squires  and  duennas ;  she  is  the  woman  of 
another  family  who  has  come  into  his,  the  stranger 
who  must  be  respected  (as  that  most  typical  mediaeval 
wife,  Eleanor  of  Guienne,  was  respected  by  her 
husbands)  on  account  of  her  fiefs,  her  vassals,  her 
kinsfolk  ;  but  who  cannot  be  loved.  Can  there  be 
love  between  man  and  wife  ?  There  cannot  be  love 
between  man  and  wife.  This  is  no  answer  of  mine,  • 
fantastically  deduced  from  mediaeval  poetry.    It  is  the 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  355 

answer  solemnly  made  to  the  solemnly  asked  question 
by  the  Court  of  Love  held  by  the  Countess  of  Cham- 
pagne in  1 1 74,  and  registered  by  Master  Andrew  the 
King  of  France's  chaplain  :  "  Dicimus  enim  et  stabilito 
tenore  firmamus  amorem  non  posse  inter  duos  jugales 
suas  extendere  vires."  And  the  reason  alleged  for  this 
judgment  brings  us  back  to  the  whole  conception  of 
mediaeval  love  as  a  respectful  service  humbly  waiting 
for  a  reward :  "  For,"  pursues  the  decision  published 
by  Andre  le  Chapelain,  "  whereas  lovers  grant  to  each 
other  favours  freely  and  from  no  legal  necessity, 
married  people  have  the  duty  of  obeying  each  other's 
wishes  and  of  refusing  nothing  to  one  another."  "  No 
love  is  possible  between  man  and  wife,"  repeat  the 
Courts  of  Love  which,  consisting  of  all  the  highborn 
ladies  of  the  province  and  presided  by  some  mighty 
queen  or  princess,  represent  the  social  opinions  of  the 
day.  "  But  this  lady,"  says  a  knight  (Miles)  before 
the  love  tribunal  of  Queen  Eleanor,  "  promised  to  me 
that  if  ever  she  should  lose  the  love  of  her  lover,  she 
would  take  me  in  his  place.  She  has  wedded  the  man 
who  was  her  lover,  and  I  have  come  to  claim  fulfil- 
ment of  her  promise."  The  court  discusses  for  awhile. 
"  We  cannot,"  answers  Queen  Eleanor,  "  go  against  the 
Countess  of  Champagne's  decision  that  love  cannot 
exist  between  man  and  wife.  We  therefore  desire  this 
lady  to  fulfil  her  promise  and  give  you  her  love."  Again, 
there  come  to  the  Court  of  Love  of  the  Viscountess 
of  Narbonne  a  knight  and  a  lady,  who  desire  to  know 


356  EUPHORION. 

whether,  having  been  once  married,  but  since  divorced, 
a  love  engagement  between  them  would  be  honourable. 
The  viscountess  decides  that  "  Love  between  those 
who  have  been  married  together,  but  who  have  since 
been  divorced  from  one  another,  is  not  to  be  deemed 
reprehensible ;  nay,  that  it  is  to  be  considered  as 
honourable."  And  these  Courts  of  Love,  be  it  remarked, 
were  frequently  held  on  occasion  of  the  marriage  of 
great  personages  ;  as,  for  instance,  of  that  between 
Louis  VIL  and  Eleanor  of  Poitiers  in  ii 37.  The 
poetry  of  the  early  Middle  Ages  follows  implicitly 
the  decisions  of  these  tribunals,  which  reveal  a  state 
of  society  to  which  the  nearest  modern  approach  is 
that  of  Italy  in  the  eighteenth  century,  when,  as 
Goldoni  and  Parini  show  us,  as  Stendhal  (whose  "  De 
I'Amour  "  may  be  taken  as  the  modern  "  Breviari 
d' Amor  ")  expounds,  there  was  no  impropriety  possible 
as  long  as  a  lady  was  beloved  by  any  one  except  her 
own  husband.  No  love,  therefore,  between  unmarried 
people  (the  cyclical  romances,  as  before  stated,  and 
the  Amadises,  belong  to  another  time  of  social  con- 
dition, and  the  only  real  exception  to  my  rule  of  which 
I  can  think  is  the  lovely  French  tale  of  "  Aucassin  et 
Nicolette  ")  ;  and  no  love  between  man  and  wife.  But 
love  there  must  be  ;  and  love  there  consequently  is  ; 
love  for  the  married  woman  from  the  man  who  is  not 
her  husband.  The  feudal  lady,  married  without  being 
consulted  and  without  having  had  a  chance  of  know- 
ing what  love  is,  yet  lives  to  know  love ;  lives  to  be 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  357 

taught  it  by  one  of  these  many  bachelors  bound  to 
flutter  about  her  in  military  service  or  social  duty  ; 
lives  to  teach  it  herself.  And  she  is  too  powerful  in 
her  fiefs  and  kinsmen,  too  powerful  in  the  public 
opinion  which  approves  and  supports  her,  to  be 
hampered  by  her  husband.  The  husband,  indeed, 
has  grown  up  in  the  same  habits,  has  known,  before 
marrying,  the  customs  sanctioned  by  the  Courts  of 
Love ;  he  has  been  the  knight  of  some  other  man's 
wife  in  his  day,  what  right  has  he  to  object?  As  in 
the  days  of  Italian  cecisbei,  the  early  mediaeval  lover 
might  say  with  Goldoni's  Don  Alfonso  or  Don 
Roberto,  "  I  serve  your  wife — such  or  such  another 
serves  mine,  what  harm  can  there  be  in  it } "  ("  lo 
servo  vostra  moglie,  Don  Eugenio  favorisce  la  mia;  che 
male  c'  e?"  I  am  quoting  from  memory.)  And  as  a 
fact,  we  hear  little  of  jealousy  ;  the  amusement  of  En 
Barral  when  Peire  Vidal  came  in  and  kissed  his  sleep- 
ing wife  ;  and  the  indignation  of  all  Provence  for  the 
murder  of  Guillems  de  Cabestanh  (buried  in  the  same 
tomb  with  the  lady  who  had  been  made  to  eat  of  his 
heart) — showing  from  opposite  sides  how  the  society 
accustomed  to  Courts  of  Love  looked  upon  the  duties 
of  husbands. 

Such  was  the  social  life  in  those  feudal  courts 
whence  first  arises  the  song  of  mediaeval  love,  and 
that  this  is  the  case  is  proved  by  the  whole  huge 
body  of  early  mediaeval  poetry.  We  must  not  judge, 
as  I  have  said,  either  by  poems  of  much  earlier  date. 


35«  EUPHORION. 

like  the  Nibelungen  and  the  Carolingian  chmisons  de 
S^este,  which  merely  received  a  new  form  in  the  early- 
Middle  Ages  ;  still  less  from  the  prose  romances  of 
Melusine,  Milles  et  Amys,  Palemon  and  Arcite,  and  a 
host  of  others  which  were  elaborated  only  later  and 
under  the  influence  of  the  quite  unfeudal  habits  of  the 
great  cities ;  and  least  of  all  from  that  strange  late 
southern  cycle  of  the  Amadises,  from  which,  odd  as  it 
seems,  many  of  our  notions  of  chivalric  love  have^ 
through  our  ancestors,  through  the  satirists  or  burlesque 
poets  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries,  been 
inherited.  We  must  look  at  the  tales  which,  as  we 
are  constantly  being  told  by  trouveres,  troubadours, 
and  minnesingers,  were  the  fashionable  reading  of  the 
feudal  classes  of  the  twelfth  and  thirteenth  centuries  : 
the  tales  best  known  to  us  in  the  colourless  respecta- 
bility of  the  collection  made  in  the  reign  of  Edward 
IV.  by  Sir  Thomas  Malory,  and  called  by  him  the 
"  Morte  d'Arthur "  —  of  the  ladies  and  knights  of 
Arthur's  court ;  of  the  quest  of  the  Grail  by  spotless 
knights  who  were  bastards  and  fathers  of  bastards ; 
of  the  intrigues  of  Tristram  of  Lyoness  and  Queen 
Yseult ;  of  Launcelot  and  Guenevere  ;  the  tales  which 
Francesca  and  Paolo  read  together.  We  must  look, 
above  all,  at  the  lyric  poetry  of  France,  Provence, 
Germany,  and  Sicily  in  the  early  Middle  Ages. 

Vos  qui  tr^s  bien  ameis  i  petit  mentendeis 
Por  I'amor  de  Ihesu  les  pucelles  ameis. 
Nos  trouvons  en  escris  de  sainte  auctoriteis 
Ke  pucelle  est  la  flor  de  loyaulment  ameir. 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  359 

This  strange  entreaty  to  love  the  maidens  for  the 
sake  of  Christ's  love,  this  protest  of  a  nameless 
northern  French  poet  (VVackernagel,  Altfranzosische 
Lieder  and  Leiche  IX.)  against  the  adulterous  passion 
of  his  contemporaries,  comes  to  us,  pathetically- 
enough,  solitary,  faint,  unnoticed  in  the  vast  chorus, 
boundless  like  the  spring  song  of  birds  or  the  sound 
of  the  waves,  of  poets  singing  the  love  of  other  men's 
wives.  But,  it  may  be  objected — how  can  we  tell  that 
these  love  songs,  so  carefully  avoiding  all  mention  of 
names,  are  not  addressed  to  the  desired  bride,  to  the 
legitimate  wife  of  the  poet  ?  For  several  reasons  ; 
and  mainly,  for  the  crushing  evidence  of  an  undefin- 
able  something  which  tells  us  that  they  are  not.  The 
other  reasons  are  easily  stated.  We  know  that  feudal 
habits  would  never  have  allowed  to  unmarried  women 
(and  women  were  married  when  scarcely  out  of  their 
childhood)  the  opportunities  for  the  relations  which 
obviously  exist  between  the  poet  and  his  lady ;  and 
that,  if  by  some  accident  a  young  knight  might  fall 
in  love  with  a  girl,  he  would  address  not  her  but  her 
parents,  since  the  Middle  Ages,  who  were  indifferent 
to  adultery,  were,  like  the  southern  nations  among 
whom  the  married  woman  is  not  expected  to  be 
virtuous,  extreme  sticklers  for  the  purity  of  their 
unmarried  womankind.  Further,  we  have  no  instance 
of  an  unmarried  woman  being  ever  addressed  during 
the  early  Middle  Ages,  in  those  terms  of  social  respect 
— madame,    donina,  froive,    madonna — which    essen- 


36o  EUPHORION. 

tially  belong  to  the  mistress  of  a  household  ;  nor  do 
these  stately  names  fit  in  with  any  theory  which  would 
make  us  believe  that  the  lady  addressed  by  the  poet 
is  the  jealously  guarded  daughter  of  the  house  with 
whom  he  is  plotting  a  secret  marriage,  or  an  elope- 
ment to  end  off  in  marriage.  This  is  not  the  way 
that  Romeo  speaks  to  Juliet,  nor  even  that  the 
princesses  in  the  cyclical  romances  and  in  the  Ama- 
dises  are  wooed  by  their  bridegrooms.  This  is  not 
the  language  of  a  lover  who  is  broaching  his  love,  and 
who  hopes,  however  timidly,  to  consummate  it  before 
all  the  world  by  marriage.  It  is  obviously  the  lan- 
guage of  a  man  either  towards  a  woman  who  is  taking 
a  pleasure  in  keeping  him  dangling  without  favours 
which  she  has  implicitly  or  explicitly  promised  ;  or 
towards  a  woman  who  is  momentarily  withholding 
favours  which  her  lover  has  habitually  enjoyed.  And 
in  a  large  proportion  of  cases  the  poems  of  trouveres, 
troubadours,  and  minnesingers  are  the  expression  of 
fortunate  love,  the  fond  recollection  or  eager  expec- 
tation of  meetings  with  the  beloved.  All  this  can 
evidently  not  be  connected  with  the  wooing,  however 
stealthy,  however  Romeo-and-Juliet-like  of  a  bride ; 
still  less  can  it  be  explained  in  reference  to  love 
within  wedlock.  A  man  does  not,  however  loving, 
worship  his  wife  as  his  social  superior ;  he  does  not 
address  her  in  titles  of  stiff  respect ;  he  does  not  sigh 
and  weep  and  supplicate  for  love  which  is  his  due, 
and  remind  his  wife  that  she  owes  it  him  in  return 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  361 

for  loyal,  humble,  discreet  service.  Above  all,  a  man 
(except  in  some  absurd  comedy  perhaps,  where  the 
husband,  in  an  age  of  cicisbeos,  is  in  love  with  his  own 
wife  and  dares  not  admit  it  before  the  society  which 
holds  "that  there  can  be  no  love  between  married 
folk  "  ) — a  husband,  I  repeat,  does  not  beg  for,  arrange, 
look  forward  to,  and  recall  with  triumph  or  sadness, 
secret  meetings  with  his  own  wife.  Now  the  secret 
meeting  is,  in  nearly  every  aristocratic  poet  of  the 
early  poetry,  the  inevitable  result  of  the  humble  praises 
and  humble  requests  for  kindness ;  it  is,  most  obviously, 
the  reward  for  which  the  poet  is  always  importun- 
ing. Mediaeval  love  poetry,  compared  with  the  love 
poetry  of  Antiquity  and  the  love  poetry  of  the  revival 
of  letters,  is,  in  its  lyric  form,  decidedly  chaste ;  but 
it  is  perfectly  explicit ;  and,  for  all  its  metaphysical 
tendencies  and  its  absence  of  clearly  painted  pictures, 
the  furthest  possible  removed  from  being  Platonic. 
One  of  the  most  important,  characteristic,  and  artis- 
tically charming  categories  of  mediaeval  love  lyrics 
is  that  comprising  the  Provencal  serena  and  alba, 
with  their  counterparts  in  the  langtie  d'oil,  and  the 
so-called  WacJitlieder  of  the  minnesingers ;  and 
this  category  of  love  poetry  may  be  defined  as  the 
drama,  in  four  acts,  of  illicit  love.  The  faithful  lover 
has  received  from  his  lady  an  answer  to  his  love,  the 
place  and  hour  are  appointed  ;  all  the  day  of  which 
the  evening  is  to  bring  him  this  honour,  he  goes  heavy 
hearted  and  sighing  :  "  Day,  much  do  you  grow  for  my 


362  EUPH ORION. 

grief,  and  the  evening,  the  evening  and  the  long  hope 
kills  me."  Thus  far  the  serena,  the  evening  song, 
of  Guiraut  Riquier.  A  lovely  anonymous  alba,. 
whose  refrain,  "  Oi  deus,  oi  deus  ;  de  1'  alba,  tan  tost 
ve !  "  is  familiar  to  every  smatterer  of  Provencal, 
shows  us  the  lady  and  her  knight  in  an  orchard 
beneath  the  hawthorn,  giving  and  taking  the  last 
kisses  while  the  birds  sing  and  the  sky  whitens  with 
dawn.  "The  lady  is  gracious  and  pleasant,  and  many 
look  upon  her  for  her  beauty,  and  her  heart  is  all  in 
loving  loyally  ;  alas,  alas,  the  dawn  !  how  soon  it 
comes ! — "  Oi  deus,  oi  deus  ;  de  1'  alba,  tan  tost  ve  ! " 
The  real  alba  is  the  same  as  the  German  Wacht- 
lieder,  the  song  of  the  squire  or  friend  posted  at  the 
garden  gate  or  outside  the  castle  wall,  warning  the 
lovers  to  separate.  "  Fair  comrade  (Bel  Companho),, 
I  call  to  you  singing,  '  Sleep  no  more,  for  I  hear  the 
birds  announcing  the  day  in  the  trees,  and  I  fear  that 
the  jealous  one  may  find  you  ; '  and  in  a  moment  it  will. 
be  day,  '  Bel  Companho,  come  to  the  window  and  look 
at  the  signs  in  the  sky !  you  will  know  me  a  faithful 
messenger  ;  if  you  do  it  not,  it  will  be  to  your  harm, 
and  in  a  moment  it  will  be  dawn  (et  ades  sera  1'  alba). 
Bel  Companho,  since  I  left  you  I  have  not  slept  nor 
raised  myself  from  my  knees  ;  for  I  have  prayed  to 
God  the  Son  of  Saint  Mary,  that  he  should  send  me 
back  my  faithful  comrade,  and  in  a  moment  it  will  be 
dawn  ! '"  In  this  alba  of  Guiraut  de  Borneulh,  the 
lover  comes  at  last  to  the  window,  and  cries  to  his 


MEDL-EVAL  LOVE.  ^S-^ 

watching  comrade  that  he  is  too  happy  to  care  either 
for  the  dawn  or  for  the  jealous  one.  The  German 
WacJitlieder  are  even  more  explicit.  *'  He  must  away 
at  once  and  without  delay,"  sings  the  watchman  in 
a  poem  of  Wolfram,  the  austere  singer  of  Parzifal' 
and  the  Grail  Quest ;  "  let  him  go,  sweet  lady ;  let 
him  away  from  thy  love  so  that  he  keep  his  honour 
and  life.  He  trusted  himself  to  me  that  I  should 
bring  him  safely  hence  ;  it  is  day  ..."  "  Sing  what 
thou  wilt,  watchman,"  answers  the  lady,  "  but  leave 
him  here."  In  a  far  superior,  but  also  far  less  chaste, 
poem  of  Heinrich  von  Morungen,  the  lady,  alone  and 
melancholy,  wakes  up  remembering  the  sad  white 
light  of  morning,  the  sad  cry  of  the  watchman,  which 
separated  her  from  her  knight.  Still  more  frankly, 
and  in  a  poem  which  is  one  of  the  few  real  master- 
pieces of  Minnesang,  the  lady  in  Walther  von  der 
Vogelweide's  "  Under  der  linden  an  der  Heide " 
narrates  a  meeting  in  the  wood.  "  What  passed 
between  us  shall  never  be  known  by  any !  never  by 
any,  save  him  and  me — yes,  and  by  the  little  nightin- 
gale that  sang  Tandaradei!  The  little  bird  will  surely 
be  discreet." 

The  songs  of  light  love  for  another's  wife  of  trouba- 
dour, trouvere,  and  minnesinger,  seem  to  have  been 
squeezed  together,  so  that  all  their  sweet  and  acrid 
perfume  is,  so  to  speak,  sublimated,  in  the  recently 
discov^ered  early  Provencal  narrative  poem  called 
"  Flamenca."     Like  the  "Tristram"  of  Gottfried  von 


364  EUPHORION. 

Strassburg,  like  all  these  light  mediaeval  love  lyrics 
of  which  I  have  been  speaking,  the  rhymed  story  of 
"  Flamenca,"  a  pale  and  simple,  but  perfect  petalled 
daisy,  has  come  up  in  a  sort  of  moral  and  intellectual 
dell  in  the  winter  of  the  Middle  Ages — a  dell  such  as 
you  meet  in  hollows  of  even  the  most  wind-swept 
southern  hills,  where,  while  all  round  the  earth  is 
frozen  and  the  short  grass  nibbled  away  by  the  frost, 
may  be  found  even  at  Christmas  a  bright  sheen  of 
budding  wheat  beneath  the  olives  on  the  slope,  a 
yellow  haze  of  sun  upon  the  grass  in  which  the  little 
aromatic  shoots  of  fennel  and  mint  and  marigold 
pattern  with  greenness  the  sere  brown,  the  frost-burnt ; 
where  the  very  leafless  fruit  trees  have  a  spring-like  rosy 
tinge  against  the  blue  sky,  and  the  tufted  little  osiers 
flame  a  joyous  orange  against  the  greenness  of  the  hill. 
Such  spots  there  are — and  many — in  the  winter  of 
the  Middle  Ages  ;  though  it  is  not  in  them,  but  where 
the  rain  beats,  and  the  snow  and  the  wind  tugs,  that 
grow,  struggling  with  bitterness,  the  great  things  of 
the  day  :  the  philosophy  of  Abelard,  the  love  of  man 
of  St.  Francis,  the  patriotism  of  the  Lombard  com- 
munes ;  nor  that  lie  dormant,  fertilized  in  the  cold 
earth,  the  great  things  of  art  and  thought,  the  great 
things  to  come.  But  in  them  arise  the  delicate  winter 
flowers  which  we  prize  :  tender,  pale  things,  without 
much  life,  things  either  come  too  soon  or  stayed  too 
late,  among  which  is  "Flamenca  ;  "  one  of  those  roses, 
nipped  and  wrinkled,  but  stained  a  brighter  red  by 


MEDIAEVAL  LOVE.  365 

the  frost,  which  we  pluck  in  December  or  in  March  ; 
beautiful,  bright,  scentless  roses,  which,  scarce  in  bud, 
already  fall  to  pieces  in  our  hand.  "  Flamenca "  is 
simply  the  narrative  of  the  loves  of  the  beautiful  wife 
of  the  bearish  and  jealous  Count  Archambautz,  and 
of  Guillems  de  Nevers,  a  brilliant  young  knight  who 
hears  of  the  lady's  sore  captivity,  is  enamoured  before 
he  sees  her,  dresses  up  as  the  priest's  clerk,  and 
speaks  one  word  with  her  while  presenting  the  mass 
book  to  be  kissed,  every  holiday ;  and  finally  deceives 
the  vigilance  of  the  husband  by  means  of  a  subter- 
ranean corridor,  which  he  gets  built  between  his 
inn  and  the  bath-room  of  the  lady  at  the  famous 
waters  of  Bourbon  -  les  -  Bains.  In  this  world  of 
"  Flamenca,"  which  is  in  truth  the  same  world  as 
that  of  the  "  Romaunt  of  the  Rose,"  the  "  Morte 
d'Arthur,"  and  of  the  love  poets  of  early  France 
and  Germany,  conjugal  morality  and  responsibility 
simply  do  not  exist.  It  seems  an  unreal  pleasure- 
garden,  with  a  shadowy  guardian  —  impalpable  to 
us  gross  moderns — called  Honour,  but  where,  as  it 
seems.  Love  only  reigns.  Love,  not  the  mystic  and 
melancholy  god  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova,"  but  a  fop- 
pish young  deity,  sentimental  at  once  and  sensual,  of 
fashionable  feudal  life :  the  god  of  people  with  no 
apparent  duties  towards  others,  unconscious  of  any 
restraints  save  those  of  this  vague  thing  called 
honour  ;  whose  highest  mission  for  the  knight,  as  put 
in  our  English  "  Romaunt  of  the  Rose  "  is  to — 


366  EUP  MORION. 

Set  thy  might  and  alle  thy  witte 
Wymmen  and  ladies  for  to  plese, 
And  to  do  thyng  that  may  hem  ese ; 

while,  for  the  lady,  it  is  expressed  with  perfect  sim- 
plicity of  shamelessness  by  Flamenca  herself  to  her 
damsels,  teaching  them  that  the  woman  must  yield 
to  the  pleasure  of  her  lover.  Now  love,  when  young, 
when,  so  to  speak,  but  just  born  and  able  to  feed  (as 
a  newborn  child  on  milk,  without  hungering  for  more 
solid  food)  on  looks  and  words  and  sighs  ;  love  thus 
young,  is  a  fair-seeming  godhead,  and  the  devotion  to 
him  a  pretty  and  delicate  piece  of  aestheticism.  And 
such  it  is  here  in  "Flamenca,"  where  there  certainly 
•exists  neither  God  nor  Christ,  both  complete  absentees, 
whose  priest  becomes  a  courteous  lover's  valet,  whose 
church  the  place  for  amorous  rendezvous,  whose 
sacrifice  of  mass  and  prayer  becomes  a  means  of 
amorous  correspondence  :  Cupid,  in  the  shape  of  his 
slave  Guillems  de  Nevers — become  patarin  (zealot)  for 
love — peeping  with  shaven  golden  head  from  behind 
the  missal,  touching  the  lady's  hand  and  whispering 
with  the  words  of  spiritual  peace  the  declaration  of 
love,  the  appointment  for  meeting.  God  and  Christ, 
I  repeat,  are  absentees.  Where  they  are  I  know  not ; 
perhaps  over  the  Rhine  with  the  Lollards  in  their 
weavers'  dens,  or  over  the  Alps  in  the  cell  of  St. 
Francis  ;  not  here,  certainly,  or  if  here,  themselves 
become  the  mere  slaves  of  love.  But  this  King  Love, 
as   long   as   a  mere  infant,    is  a  sweet  and  gracious 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  367 

divinity,  surrounded  by  somewhat  of  the  freshness 
and  hawthorn  sweetness  of  spring  which  seem  to  ac- 
company his  favourite  Guillems.  Guillems  de  Nevers, 
"  who  could  still  grow,"  this  brilliant  knight  and  trou- 
badour, in  his  white  silken  and  crimson  and  purple 
garments  and  soundless  shoes  embroidered  with 
flowers,  this  prince  of  tournaments  and  tensos,  who 
hearing  the  sorrows  of  the  beautiful  Flamenca,  loves 
her  unseen,  sits  sighing  in  sight  of  her  prison  bower, 
and  faints  like  a  hero  of  the  Arabian  Nights  at  her 
name,  and  has  visions  of  her  as  St.  Francis  has  of 
Christ ;  this  younger  and  brighter  Sir  Launcelot,  is 
an  ideal  little  figure,  whom  you  might  mistake  for 
Love  himself  as  described  in  the  "  Romaunt  of  the 
Rose  ; "  Love's  avatar  or  incarnation,  on  whose  ap- 
pearance the  year  blooms  into  spring,  the  fruit  trees 
blossom,  the  birds  sing,  the  girls  dance  at  eve  round 
the  maypoles  ;  behind  whom,  while  reading  this  poem, 
we  seem  to  see  the  corn  shine  green  beneath  the 
olives,  the  white-blossomed  branches  slant  across  the 
blue  sky.  For  is  he  not  the  very  incarnation  of 
chivalry,  of  beauty,  and  of  love  ?  So  much  for  this 
King  Love  while  but  quite  young.  Unfortunately  he 
is  speedily  weaned  of  his  baby  food  of  mere  blushing 
glances  and  sighed-out  names  ;  and  then  his  aspect, 
his  kingdom's  aspect,  the  aspect  of  his  votaries,  under- 
goes a  change.  The  profane  but  charming  game  of 
the  loving  clerk  and  the  missal  is  exchanged  for  the 
more  coarse  hide-and-seek  of  hidden  causeways  and 


368  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

tightened  bolts,  with  jealous  husbands  guarding  the 
useless  door  ;  Guillems  becomes  but  an  ordinary  Don 
Juan  or  Lovelace,  Flamenca  but  a  sorry,  sneaking 
adulteress,  and  the  gracious  damsels  mere  common 
sluts,  curtseying  at  the  loan  (during  the  interview  of 
nobler  folk)  of  the  gallant's  squires.  For  the  scent  of 
May,  of  fresh  leaves  and  fallen  blossoms,  we  get  the 
nauseous  vapours  of  the  bath-room ;  and,  alas.  King 
Love  has  lost  his  aureole  and  his  wings  and  turned 
keeper  of  the  hot  springs,  sought  out  by  the  gouty 
and  lepers,  of  Bourbon-les-Bains  ;  and  in  closing 
this  book,  so  delightfully  begun,  we  sicken  at  the 
whiff  of  hot  and  fetid  moral  air  as  we  should  sicken 
in  passing  over  the  outlet  of  the  polluted  hot  water. 

"  But  where  is  the  use  of  telling  us  all  this  ? "  the 
reader  will  ask  ;  "  every  one  knows  that  illicit  passion 
existed  and  exists,  and  has  its  chroniclers,  its  singers 
in  prose  and  in  verse.  But  what  has  all  this  poetry 
of  common  adultery  to  do  with  a  book  like  the  '  Vita 
Nuova,'  with  that  strange  new  thing,  that  lifelong 
worship  of  a  woman,  which  you  call  mediseval  love  ? " 
This  much  :  that  out  of  this  illicit  love,  and  out  of  it, 
gross  as  it  looks,  alone  arises  the  possibility  of  the 
"  Vita  Nuova  ; "  arises  the  possibility  of  the  romantic 
and  semi-religious  love  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Or, 
rather,  let  us  say  that  this  mere  loose  love  of  the  albas 
and  Wachtlieder  and  "  Flamenca,"  is  the  substratum, 
nay,  is  the  very  flesh  and  blood,  of  the  spiritual  passion 
to  which,  in  later  days,  we  owe  the  book  of  Beatrice. 


MED  LEVA  L  LOVE.  369 

It  is  a  harsh  thing  to  say,  but  one  which  all  sociology 
teaches  us,  that  as  there  exists  no  sensual  relation 
which  cannot  produce  for  its  ennoblement  a  certain 
amount  of  passion,  so  also  does  there  exist  no  passion 
(and  Ph?edrus  is  there  to  prove  it)  so  vile  and  loath- 
some as  to  be  unable  to  weave  about  itself  a  glamour 
of  ideal  sentiment.  The  poets  of  the  Middle  Ages 
strove  after  the  criminal  possession  of  another  man's 
wife.  This,  however  veiled  with  fine  and  delicate 
poetic  expressions,  is  the  thing  for  which  they  wait 
and  sigh  and  implore  ;  this  is  the  reward,  the 
supremely  honouring  and  almost  sanctifying  reward 
which  the  lady  cannot  refuse  to  the  knight  who  has 
faithfully  and  humbly  served  her.  The  whole  bulk  of 
the  love  lyrics  of  the  early  Middle  Ages  are  there  to 
prove  it ;  and  if  the  allusions  in  them  are  not  suffi- 
ciently clear,  those  who  would  be  enlightened  may 
study  the  discussions  of  the  allegorical  persons  even 
in  the  English  (and  later)  version  of  Guillaume  de 
Lorris'  "  Roman  de  la  Rose  ; "  and  turn  to  what,  were 
it  in  langiie  d'oc,  we  should  call  a  tenso  of  Guillaume 
li  Viniers  among  Matzner's  "  Altfranzosische  Lieder- 
dichter."  The  catastrophe  of  Ulrich  von  Liechten- 
stein's "  Frowendienst,"  where  the  lady,  the  "  virtuous," 
the  "  pure,"  as  he  is  pleased  to  call  her,  after  making 
him  cut  off  his  finger,  dress  in  leper's  clothes,  chop 
off  part  of  his  upper  lip,  and  go  through  the  most 
marvellous  Quixotic  antics  dressed  in  satin  and  pearls 
and  false  hair  as  Queen  Venus,  and  jousting  in  this 
25 


370  EUPHORION. 

■costume  with  every  knight  between  Venice  and 
Styria,  all  for  her  honour  and  glory;  pulls  the  gallant 
in  a  basket  up  to  her  window,  and  then  lets  him  drop 
down  into  the  moat  which  is  no  better  than  a  sewer ; 
this  grotesque  and  tragically  resented  end  of  Ulrich's 
first  love  service  speaks  volumes  on  the  point.  The 
stories  in  Nostradamus'  "  Lives  of  the  Troubadours," 
the  incidents  in  Gottfried's  "  Tristan  und  Isolde,"  nay, 
the  adventures  even  in  our  expunged  English  "  Morte 
d'Arthur,"  relating,  to  the  birth  of  Sir  Galahad,  are 
as  explicit  as  anything  in  Brantome  or  the  Queen 
of  Navarre ;  the  most  delicate  love  songs  of  Provence 
and  Germany  are  cobwebs  spun  round  Decameronian 
situations.  And  all  this  is  permitted,  admitted, 
sanctioned  by  feudal  society  even  as  the  cecisbeos  of 
the  noble  Italian  ladies  were  sanctioned  by  the  society 
of  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries.  In  the 
mediseval  castle,  where,  as  we  have  seen,  the  lady, 
separated  from  her  own  sex,  is  surrounded  by  a  swarm 
of  young  men  without  a  chance  of  marriage,  and 
bound  to  make  themselves  agreeable  to  the  wife  of  a 
military  superior  ;  the  woman  soon  ceases  to  be  the 
exclusive  property  of  her  husband,  and  the  husband 
speedily  discovers  that  the  majority,  hence  public 
ridicule,  are  against  any  attempt  at  monopolizing  her. 
Thus  adultery  becomes,  as  we  have  seen,  accepted  as 
an  institution  under  the  name  of  service  ;  and,  like  all 
other  social  institutions,  developes  a  morality  of  its 
•own — a    morality  within   immorality,  of   faithfulness 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  371 

within  infidelity.  The  lady  must  be  true  to  her 
knight,  and  the  knight  must  be  true  to  his  lady  :  the 
Courts  of  Love  solemnly  banish  from  society  any 
woman  who  is  known  to  have  more  than  one  lover. 
Faithfulness  is  the  first  and  most  essential  virtue  of 
mediaeval  love  ;  a  virtue  unknown  to  the  erotic  poets 
of  Antiquity,  and  which  modern  times  have  inherited 
from  the  Middle  Ages  as  a  requisite,  even  (as  the 
reproaches  of  poets  of  the  Alfred  de  Musset  school 
teach  us)  in  the  most  completely  illicit  love.  Tristram 
and  Launcelot,  the  two  paragons  of  knighthood,  are 
inviolably  constant  to  their  mistress  :  the  husband 
may  and  must  be  deceived,  but  not  the  wife  who 
helps  to  deceive  him.  Yseult  of  Brittany  and  Elaine, 
the  mother  of  Galahad,  do  not  succeed  in  breaking 
the  vows  made  to  Yseult  the  Fair  and  to  Queen 
Guenevere.  The  beautiful  lady  in  the  hawthorn 
alba  "  a  son  cor  en  amar  lejalmens."  But  this 
loyal  loving  is  for  the  knight  who  is  warned  to  depart, 
certainly  .not  for  the  husband,  the  gilos,  in  whose 
despite  ("  Bels  dous  amios,  baizem  nos  eu  e  vos — Aval 
els  pratzon  chantols  auzellos — Tot  o  fassam  en.  despeit 
del  gilos  ")  they  are  meeting.  The  ladies  of  the  min- 
nesingers are  "  pure,"  "  good,"  "  faithful  "  (and  each 
and  all  are  pure,  good,  and  faithful,  as  long  as  they  do 
not  resist)  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  lover,  not  of 
the  husband,  if  indeed  a  husband  be  permitted  to  have 
any  point  of  view  at  all.  And  as  fidelity  is  the 
essential  virtue  in  these  adulterous  connections,  so  in- 


372  EUPHORION. 

fidelity  is  the  greatest  crime  that  a  woman  (and  even 
a  man)  can  commit,  the  greatest  misfortune  which  fate 
can  send  to  an  unhappy  knight.  That  he  leaves  a 
faithful  mistress  behind  him  is  the  one  hope  of  the 
knight  who,  taking  the  cross,  departs  to  meet  the 
scimitars  of  Saladin's  followers,  the  fevers,  the  plagues, 
the  many  miserable  deaths  of  the  unknown  East. 
"  If  any  lady  be  unfaithful,"  says  Quienes  de  Bethune, 
"  she   will    have    to   be    unfaithful    with   some   base 

wretch." 

Et  les  dames  ki  castement  vivront 
Se  loiautd  font  a  ceus  qui  iront  ; 
Et  seles  font  par  mal  conseil  folaje, 
A  lasques  gens  et  mauvais  le  feron 
Car  tout  li  bon  iront  en  cest  voiage 

"  I  have  taken  the  cross  on  account  of  my  sins,"  sings 
Albrecht  von  Johansdorf,  one  of  the  most  earnest  of 
the  minnesingers  ;  "  now  let  God  help,  till  my  return, 
the  woman  who  has  great  sorrow  on  my  account,  in 
order  that  I  may  find  her  possessed  of  her  honour ; 
let  Him  grant  me  this  prayer.  But  if  she  change  her 
life  {i.e.,  take  to  bad  courses),  then  may  God  forbid 
my  ever  returning."  The  lady  is  bound  (the  Courts 
of  Love  decide  this  point  of  honour)  to  reward  her 
faithful  lover.  "  A  knight,"  says  a  lady,  in  an  anony- 
mous German  song  published  by  Bartsch,  "  has  served 
me  according  to  my  will.  Before  too  much  time 
elapse,  I  must  reward  him  ;  nay,  if  all  the  world  were 
to  object,  he  must  have  his  way  with  me  "  ("  und 
waerez  al  der  Werlte  leit,  so  muoz  sin  wille  an  mir 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  373 

•ergan  "),  But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  favoured  knight 
is  bound  to  protect  his  lady's  good  fame. 

Se  jai  mamie  en  tel  point  mis, 

Que  tout  motroit  (m'octroit)  sans  esformer, 

Tant  doi  je  miex  sonnor  gaiter — 

thus  one  of  the  interlocutors  in  a  French  jeu-parti, 
published  by  Matzner ;  a  rule  which,  if  we  may  judge 
from  the  behaviour  of  Tristram  and  Launcelot,  and 
from  the  last  remnants  of  mediaeval  love  lore  in 
modern  French  novels,  means  simply  that  the  more 
completely  a  man  has  induced  a  woman  to  deceive 
her  husband,  the  more  stoutly  is  he  bound  to  deny, 
with  lies,  rows,  and  blows,  that  she  has  ever  done  any- 
thing of  the  sort.  Here,  then,  we  find  established,  as 
a  very  fundamental  necessity  of  this  socially  recog- 
nized adultery,  a  reciprocity  of  fidelity  between  lover 
and  mistress  which  Antiquity  never  dreamed  of  even 
between  husband  and  wife  (Agamemnon  has  a  perfect 
right  to  Briseis  or  Chryseis,  but  Clytasmnestra  has  no 
right  to  i^gisthus)  ;  and  which  indeed  could  scarcely 
arise  as  a  moral  obligation  except  where  the  woman 
was  not  bound  to  love  the  man  (which  the  wife  is) 
and  where  her  behaviour  towards  him  depended 
wholly  upon  her  pleasure,  that  is  to  say,  upon  her 
satisfaction  with  his  behaviour  towards  her.  This, 
which  seems  to  us  so  obvious,  and  of  which  every 
day  furnishes  us  an  example  in  the  relations  ol 
the  modern  suitor  and  his  hoped-for  wife,  could  not, 
at    a   time   when    women   were    married    by   family 


374  EUPHORION. 

arrangement,  arise  except  as  a  result  of  illegitimate 
love.  Horrible  as  it  seems,  the  more  we  examine 
into  this  subject  of  mediaeval  love,  the  more  shall  we 
see  that  our  whole  code  of  Grandisonian  chivalry 
between  lovers  who  intend  marriage  is  derived  from 
the  practice  of  the  Launcelots  and  Gueneveres,  not 
from  that  of  the  married  people  (we  may  remember 
the  manner  in  which  Gunther  woos  his  wife  Brunhilt 
in  the  Nibelungenlied)  of  former  ages  ;  nay,  the  more 
we  shall  have  to  recognize  that  the  very  feeling  which 
constitutes  the  virtuous  love  of  modern  poets  is  de- 
rived from  the  illegitimate  loves  of  the  Middle  Ages. 

Let  us  examine  what  are  the  habits  of  feeling  and 
thinking  which  grow  out  of  this  reciprocal  fidelity 
due  to  the  absence  of  all  one-sided  legal  pressure  in 
this  illegitimate,  but  socially  legitimated,  love  of  the 
early  Middle  Ages  ;  which  are  added  on  to  it  by  the 
very  necessities  of  illicit  connection.  The  lover,  having 
no  right  to  the  favours  of  his  mistress,  is  obliged, 
in  order  to  win  and  to  keep  them,  to  please  her  by 
humility,  fidelity,  and  such  knightly  qualities  as  are 
the  ideal  plumage  of  a  man  :  he  must  bring  home  to 
her,  by  showing  the  world  her  colours  victorious  in 
serious  warfare,  in  the  scarcely  less  dangerous  play  of 
tournaments,  and  by  making  her  beauty  and  virtues 
more  illustrious  in  his  song  than  are  those  of  other 
women  in  the  songs  of  their  lovers — he  must  bring 
home  to  her  that  she  has  a  more  worthy  servant  than, 
her  rivals  ;  he  must  determine  her  to  select  him  and! 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  sYS 

to  adhere  to  her  selection.  Now  mediseval  husbands 
select  their  wives,  instead  of  being  selected  ;  and  once 
the  woman  and  the  dowry  are  in  their  hands,  trouble 
themselves  but  little  whether  they  are  approved  of  or 
not.  On  the  other  hand,  the  mistress  appears  to  her 
lover  invested  with  imaginative,  ideal  advantages 
such  as  cannot  surround  her  in  the  eyes  of  her 
husband  :  she  is,  in  nearly  every  case,  his  superior  in 
station  and  the  desired  of  many  beholders  ;  she  is 
bound  to  him  by  no  tie  which  may  grow  prosaic  and 
wearisome  ;  she  appears  to  him  in  no  domestic 
capacity,  can  never  descend  to  be  the  female  drudge  ; 
her  possession  is  prevented  from  growing  stale,  her 
personality  from  becoming  commonplace,  by  the 
difficulty,  rareness,  mystery,  adventure,  danger,  which 
even  in  the  days  of  Courts  of  Love  attach  to  illicit 
amours  ;  above  all,  being  for  this  man  neither  the 
housewife  nor  the  mother,  she  remains  essentially  and 
continually  the  mistress,  the  beloved.  Similarly  the 
relations  between  the  knight  and  the  lady,  untroubled 
by  domestic  worries,  pecuniary  difficulties,  and 
squabbles  about  children,  remain,  exist  merely  as 
love  relations,  relations  of  people  whose  highest  and 
sole  desire  is  to  please  one  another.  Moreover,  and 
this  is  an  important  consideration,  the  lady,  who  is 
a  mere  inexperienced,  immature  girl  when  she  first 
meets  her  husband,  is  a  mature  woman,  with  cha- 
racter and  passions  developed  by  the  independence  of 
conjugal  and  social  life,  when  she  meets  her  lover  ; 


37t>  EUPHORION. 

whatever  power  or  dignity  of  character  she  may 
possess  is  ripe ;  whatever  intensity  of  aspiration  and 
passion  may  be  latent  is  ready  to  come  forth  ;  for  the 
first  time  there  is  equality  in  love.  Equality  ?  Ah, 
no.  This  woman  who  is  the  wife  of  his  feudal  superior, 
this  woman  surrounded  by  all  the  state  of  feudal 
sovereignty,  this  woman  who,  however  young,  has 
already  known  so  much  of  life,  this  woman  whose 
love  is  a  free  gift  of  grace  to  the  obscure,  trembling 
vassal  who  has  a  right  not  even  to  be  noticed  ;  this 
lady  of  mediaeval  love  must  always  remain  immeasur- 
ably above  her  lover.  And,  in  the  long  day-dreams 
while  watching  her,  as  he  thinks  unseen,  while  singing 
of  her,  as  he  thinks  unheard,  there  cluster  round  her 
figure,  mistily  seen  in  his  fancy,  those  vague  and 
mystic  splendours  which  surround  the  new  sovereign 
of  the  Middle  Ages,  the  Queen  of  Heaven  ;  there 
mingles  in  the  half-terrified  raptures  of  the  first  kind 
glance,  the  first  encouraging  word,  the  ineffable 
passion  stored  up  in  the  Christian's  heart  for  the 
immortal  beings  who,  in  the  days  of  Bernard  and 
Francis,  descend  cloud-like  on  earth  and  fill  the  cells 
of  the  saints  with  unendurable  glory. 

And  thus,  out  of  the  baseness  of  habitual  adultery, 
arises  incense-like,  in  the  early  mediaeval  poetry,  a  new 
kind  of  love — subtler,  more  imaginative,  more  pas- 
sionate, a  love  of  the  fancy  and  the  heart,  a  love 
stimulating  to  the  perfection  of  the  individual  as  is 
any  religion  ;  nay,  a  religion,  and  one  appealing  more 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  m 

•completely  to  the  complete  man,  flesh  and  soul,  than 
even  the  mystical  beliefs  of  the  Middle  Ages.  And 
as,  in  the  fantastic  song  of  Ritter  Tannhauser,  whose 
liege  lady,  so  legend  tells,  was  Dame  Venus  herself, 
the  lady  bids  the  knight  go  forth  and  fetch  her  green 
water  which  has  washed  the  setting  sun,  salamanders 
snatched  from  the  flame,  the  stars  out  of  heaven  ;  so 
would  it  seem  as  if  this  new  power  in  the  world,  this 
poetically  worshipped  woman,  had  sent  forth  mankind 
to  seek  wonderful  new  virtues,  never  before  seen  on 
earth.  Nay,  rather,  as  the  snowflakes  became  green 
leaves,  the  frost  blossoms  red  and  blue  flowers,  the 
winter  wind  a  spring-scented  breeze,  when  Bernard 
de  Ventadorn  was  greeted  by  his  mistress  ;  so  also 
does  it  seem  as  if,  at  the  first  greeting  of  the  world  by 
this  new  love,  the  mediaeval  winter  had  turned  to 
summer,  and  there  had  budded  fortn  and  flowered  a 
new  ideal  of  manly  virtue,  a  new  ideal  of  womanly 
grace. 

But  evil  is  evil,  and  evil  is  its  fruit.  Out  of  circum- 
stances hitherto  unknown,  circumstances  come  about 
for  the  first  time  owing  to  the  necessities  of  illegiti- 
mate passion,  have  arisen  certain  new  and  nobler 
characters  of  sexual  love,  certain  new  and  beautiful 
conceptions  of  manly  and  womanly  nature.  The 
circumstances  to  which  these  are  owed  are  pure  in 
themselves,  they  are  circumstances  which  in  more 
modern  times  have  characterized  the  perfectly  legiti- 
.mate  passion  of  lovers  held  asunder  by  no  social  law. 


2,7?.  EUPHORION. 

but  by  mere  accidental  barriers — from  Romeo  and 
Juliet  to  the  Master  of  Ravenswood  and  Lucy  Ash- 
ton  ;  and  pure  so  far  have  been  the  spiritual  results.. 
But  these  circumstances  were  due,  in  the  early  Middle 
Ages,  to  the  fact  of  adultery ;  and  to  the  new  ideal 
of  love  has  clung,  even  in  its  purity,  in  its  superior 
nobility,  an  element  of  corruption  as  unknown  to 
gross  and  corrupt  Antiquity  as  was  the  delicacy  and 
nobility  of  medieval  love.  The  most  poetical  and 
pathetic  of  all  mediaeval  love  stories,  the  very  incar- 
nation of  all  that  is  most  lyric  at  once  and  most 
tragic  in  the  new  kind  of  passion,  is  the  story,  told 
and  retold  by  a  score  of  poets  and  prose  writers,  of 
the  loves  of  Yseult  of  Ireland  and  of  Sir  Tristram  : 
who,  as  the  knight  was  bringing  the  princess  to  his 
uncle  and  her  affianced.  King  Mark  of  Cornwall, 
drank  together  by  a  fatal  mistake  a  philter  which 
made  all  such  as  partook  of  it  in  common  inseparable 
lovers  even  unto  death.  Every  one  knows  the  result: 
how  Yseult  came  to  her  husband  already  the  paramour 
of  Tristram  ;  how  Brangwaine,  her  damsel,  feeling  that 
this  unhallowed  passion  was  due  to  her  having  left 
within  reach  the  potion  intended  for  the  King  and 
Queen  of  Cornwall,  devoted  herself,  at  the  price  of 
her  maidenhood,  to  connive  in  the  amours  of  the 
lovers  whom  she  had  made;  how  King  Mark  was 
deceived,  and  doubted,  and  was  deceived  again  ;  how 
Tristram  fled  to  Brittany,  but  how,  despite  his  seem- 
ing marriage  with  another  and  equally  lovely  Yseult, 


MEDI/EVAL  LOVE.  yjg 

he  remained  faithful  to  the  Queen  of  Cornwall.  One 
version  tells  that  Mark  slew  his  nephew  while  he 
sat  harping  to  Queen  Yseult ;  another  that  Tristram 
died  of  grief  because  his  scorned  though  wedded  wife 
told  him  that  the  white-sailed  ship,  bearing  his  mistress 
to  meet  him,  bore  the  black  sail  which  mer^nt  that  she 
was  not  on  board  ;  but  all  versions,  I  think,  agree  in 
ending  with  the  fact,  that  the  briar-rose  growing  on 
the  tomb  of  the  one,  slowly  trailed  its  flowers  and 
thorns  along  till  it  had  reached  also  the  grave  of  the 
other,  and  knit  together, as  love  had  knit  together  with 
its  sweet  blossoms  and  sharp  spines,  the  two  fated 
lovers.  The  Middle  Ages  were  enthralled  by  this- 
tale  ;  but  they  were  also,  occasionally,  a  little  shocked 
by  it.  Poets  and  prose  writers  tampered  every  now  and 
then  with  incidents  and  characters,  seeking  to  make  it 
appear  that,  owing  to  the  substitution  of  the  waiting- 
maid,  and  the  neglect  of  the  wedded  princess  of 
Brittany,  Yseult  had  never  belonged  to  any  man  save 
Tristram,  nor  Tristram  to  any  woman  save  Yseult ;. 
or  that  King  Mark  had  sent  his  nephew  to  woo  the 
Irish  queen's  daughter  merely  in  hopes  of  his  perish- 
ing in  the  attempt,  and  that  his  whole  subsequent 
conduct  was  due  to  a  mere  unnatural  hatred  of  a. 
better  knight  than  himself;  touching  up  here  and 
there  with  a  view  to  justifying  and  excusing  to  some 
degree  the  long  series  of  deceits  which  constituted  the 
whole  story.  Thus  the  more  timid  and  less  gifted- 
But  when,  in  the  very  first  years  (1210)  of  the  thirteenth. 


j8o  EUPHORION. 

century,  the  greatest  mediaeval  poet  that  preceded 
Dante, the  greatest  German  poet  that  preceded  Goethe, 
Meister  Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  took  in  hand  the 
old  threadbare  story  of  "Tristan  und  Isolde,"  he 
despised  all  alterations  of  this  sort,  and  accepted  the 
original  tale  in  its  complete  crudeness. 

For,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  Gottfried  had 
conceived  this  story  as  a  thing  wholly  unknown  in 
his  time,  and  no  longer  subject  to  any  of  those  neces- 
sities of  constant  re-arrangement  which  tormented 
mediaeval  poets  :  he  had  conceived  it  not  as  a  tale,  but 
as  a  novel.  Gottfried  himself  was  probably  but  little 
aware  of  what  he  was  doing ;  the  poem  that  he  was 
writing  probably  fell  for  him  into  the  very  same  cate- 
gory as  the  poems  of  other  men  ;  but  to  us,  with  our 
experience  of  so  many  different  forms  of  narrative,  it 
must  be  evident  that  "  Tristan  und  Isolde  "  is  a  new 
departure,  inasmuch  as  it  is  not  the  story  of  deeds  and 
the  people  who  did  them,  like  the  true  epic  from 
Homer  to  the  Nibelungen ;  nor  the  story  of  people 
and  the  adventures  which  happened  to  them,  like  all 
romance  poetry  from  "  Palemon  and  Arcite,"  to  the 
"  Orlando  Furioso  ; "  but,  on  the  contrary,  the  story  of 
the  psychological  relations,  the  gradual  metamor- 
phosis of  soul  by  soul,  between  two  persons.  The 
long  introductory  story  of  Tristram's  youth  must  not 
mislead  us,  nor  all  the  minute  narrations  of  the  killing 
of  dragons  and  the  drinking  of  love  philters  :  Gott- 
fried, we  must  remember,  was  certainly  no  deliberate 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  381 

innovator,  and  these  things  are  the  mere  inevitable 
externalities  of  mediaeval  poetry,  preserved  with  dull 
slavish  care  by  the  re-writer  of  a  well-known  tale,  but 
enclosing  in  reality  something  essentially  and  start- 
lingly  modern  :  the  history  of  a  passion  and  of  the 
spiritual  changes  which  it  brings  about  in  those  who 
are  its  victims. 

To  meet  again  this  purely  psychological  interest 
we  must  skip  the  whole  rest  of  the  Middle  Ages,  nay, 
skip  even  the  great  period  of  dramatic  literature,  not 
stopping  till  we  come  to  the  end  of  the  seventeenth 
and  beginning  of  the  eighteenth  century,  to  the 
"  Princesse  de  Cleves,"  to  "  Clarissa  Harlowe,"  nay, 
really,  to  "  The  Nouvelle  Heloise."  For  even  in 
Shakespeare  there  is  always  interest  and  importance 
in  the  action  and  reaction  of  subsidiary  characters,  in 
the  event,  in  the  accidental  ;  there  is  intrigue,  chance, 
misunderstanding,  fate — active  agencies  of  which 
Othello  and  Hamlet,  King  Lear  and  Romeo,  are 
helpless  victims  ;  there  is,  even  in  this  psychological 
English  drama  of  the  Elizabethans,  fate  in  the  shape 
of  lago,  in  the  shape  of  the  Ghost,  in  the  shape  of  the 
brothers  of  Webster's  duchess ;  fate  in  the  shape  of  a 
ring,  a  letter,  a  drug,  but  fate  always.  And  in  this 
"Tristan  und  Isolde"  of  Gottfried  von  Strassburg  is 
there  not  fate  also  in  the  love  potion  intended  for 
King  Mark,  and  given  by  the  mistake  of  Brangwaine 
to  Mark's  bride  and  his  nephew  ?  To  this  objection, 
which  will  naturally  occur  to  any  reader  who  is  not 


3^2  EUPHORION. 

acquainted  with  the  poem  of  Gottfried,  I  simply 
answer,  there  is  not.  The  love  potion  there  is,  but 
it  does  not  play  the  same  part  as  do,  for'  instance,  the 
drugs  of  Friar  Laurence  and  his  intercepted  letter. 
Suppose  the  friar's  narcotic  to  have  been  less  endur- 
ing in  its  action,  or  his  message  to  have  reached  in 
safety,  why  then  Juliet  would  have  been  awake  instead 
of  asleep,  or  Romeo  would  not  have  supposed  her 
to  be  dead,  and  instead  of  the  suicide  of  the  two 
lovers,  we  should  have  had  the  successful  carying  off 
of  Juliet  by  Romeo.  Not  so  with  Gottfried.  The 
philter  is  there,  and  a  great  deal  is  talked  about  it  ; 
but  it  is  merely  one  of  the  old,  threadbare  trappings 
of  the  original  story,  which  he  has  been  too  lazy  to 
suppress  ;  it  is  merely,  for  the  reader,  the  allegorical 
signal  for  an  outburst  of  passion  which  all  our  subse- 
quent knowledge  of  Tristram  and  Yseult  shows  us 
to  be  absolutely  inevitable.  In  Gottfried's  poem,  the 
drinking  of  the  potion  signifies  merely  that  all  the 
rambling,  mediaeval  prelude,  not  to  be  distinguished 
from  the  stories  of  "  Morte  d'Arthur,"  and  of  half  the 
romances  of  the  Middle  Ages,  has  come  to  a  close  and 
may  be  forgotten  ;  and  that  the  real  work  of  the 
great  poet,  the  real,  matchless  tragedy  of  the  four 
actors — Tristram,  Yseult,  Mark,  and  Brangwaine — has 
begun. 

Yet  if  we  seek  again  to  account  to  ourselves  for  this 
astonishing  impression  of  modernness  which  we  receive 
from  Gottfried's  poem,  we  recognize  that  it  is  due  to 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  383 

something  far  more  important  than  the  mere  pre- 
cocious psychological  interest ;  nay,  rather,  that  this 
psychological  interest  is  itself  dependent  upon  the 
fact  which  makes  "Tristan  und  Isolde,"  so  modern  to 
our  feelings.  This  fact  is  simply  that  the  poem  of 
Gottfried  is  the  earliest,  and  yet  perhaps  almost  the 
completest,  example  of  a  literary  anomaly  which  An- 
tiquity, for  all  its  abominations,  did  not  know :  the 
glorification  of  fidelity  in  adultery,  the  glorification  of 
-excellence  within  the  compass  of  guilt.  Older  times 
— more  distant  from  our  own  in  spirit,  though  not 
necessarily  in  years — have  presented  us  with  many 
themes  of  guilt :  the  guilt  which  exists  according  to 
our  own  moral  standard,  but  not  according  to  that  of 
the  narrator,  as  the  magnificently  tragic  Icelandic 
incest  story  of  Sigmund  and  Signy  ;  the  guilt  which 
has  come  about  no  one  well  knows  how,  an  unfortu- 
nate circumstance  leaving  the  sinner  virtually  stainless, 
in  his  or  her  own  eyes  and  the  e}-es  of  others,  like  the 
Homeric  Helen  ;  the  heroic  guilt,  where  the  very 
heroism  seems  due  to  the  self-sacrifice  of  the  sinner's 
innocence,  of  Judith;  the  struggling,  remorseful  guilt, 
hopelessly  overcome  by  fate  and  nature,  of  Phsedra  ; 
the  dull  and  dogged  guilt,  making  the  sinner  scarce 
more  than  a  mere  physical  stumbling-block  for  others, 
of  the  murderer  Hagen  in  the  Nibelungenlied  ;  and, 
finally,  the  perverse  guilt,  delighting  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  itself,  of  demons  like  Richard  and  lago,  of 
libidinous   furies  like  the  heroines    of  Tourneur  and 


384  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

Marston.  The  guilt  theme  of  "  Tristan  und  Isolde  '* 
falls  into  none  of  these  special  categories.  This  theme, 
unguessed  even  by  Shakespeare,  is  that  of  the  virtuous 
behaviour  towards  one  another  of  two  individuals 
united  in  sinning  against  every  one  else.  Gottfried 
von  Strassburg  narrates  with  the  greatest  detail  how 
Tristram  leads  to  the  unsuspecting  king  the  un- 
blushing, unremorseful  woman  polluted  by  his  own 
embraces  ;  how  Yseult  substitutes  on  the  wedding  night 
her  spotless  damsel  Brangwaine  for  her  own  sullied 
self;  then,  terrified  lest  the  poor  victim  of  her  dis- 
honour should  ever  reveal  it,  attempts  to  have  her  bar- 
barously murdered,  and,  finally,  seeing  that  nothing 
can  shake  the  heroic  creature's  faith,  admits  her  once 
more  to  be  the  remorseful  go-between  in  her  amours. 
He  narrates  how  Tristram  dresses  as  a  pilgrim  and 
carries  the  queen  from  a  ship  to  the  shore,  in  order 
that  Yseult  may  call  on  Christ  to  bear  witness  by  a 
miracle  that  she  is  innocent  of  adultery,  never  having 
been  touched  save  by  that  pilgrim  and  her  own  hus- 
band ;  and  how,  when  the  followers  of  King  Mark 
have  surrounded  the  grotto  in  the  wood,  Tristram 
places  the  drawn  sword  between  himself  and  the 
sleeping  queen,  as  a  symbol  of  their  chastity  which 
the  king  is  too  honest  to  suspect.  He  draws,  with 
a  psychological  power  truly  extraordinary  in  the 
beginning  of  the  thirteenth  century,  the  two  other 
figures  in  this  love  drama  :  King  Mark,  cheated,  dis- 
honoured, oscillating   between  horrible  doubt,  igno- 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  385 

minious  suspicion  and  more  ignominious  credulity, 
his  love  for  his  wife,  his  trust  in  his  nephew,  his  in- 
capacity for  conceiving  ill-faith  and  fraud,  the  very 
gentleness  and  generosity  of  his  nature,  made  the 
pander  of  guilt  in  which  he  cannot  believe  ;  and,  on 
the  other  side,  Brangwaine,  the  melancholy,  mute 
victim  of  her  fidelity  to  Yseult,  the  weak,  heroic  soul, 
rewarded  only  with  cruel  ingratitude,  and  condemned 
to  screen  and  help  the  sin  which  she  loathes  and  for 
which  she  assumes  the  awful  responsibility.  All  this 
does  Gottfried  do,  yet  without  ever  seeming  to  per- 
ceive the  baseness  and  wickedness  of  this  tissue  of 
lies,  equivocations,  and  perjuries  in  which  his  lovers  hide 
their  passion  ;  without  ever  seeming  to  guess  at  the 
pathos  and  nobility  of  the  man  and  the  woman  who 
are  the  mere  trumpery  obstacles  or  trumpery  aids  to 
their  amours.  He  heaps  upon  Tristram  and  Yseult 
the  most  extravagant  praises  :  he  is  the  flower  of  all 
knighthood,  and  she,  the  kindest,  gentlest,  purest,  and 
noblest  of  women  ;  he  insists  upon  the  wickedness  ot 
the  world  which  is  for  ever  waging  war  upon  their 
passion,  and  holds  up  to  execration  all  those  who  seek 
to  spy  out  their  secret.  Gottfried  is  most  genuinely 
overcome  by  the  ideal  beauty  of  this  inextinfguishable 
devotion,  by  the  sublimity  of  this  love  which  holds 
the  whole  world  as  dross  ;  the  crimes  of  the  lovers 
are  for  him  th's  mere  culminating  point  of  their  moral 
grandeur,  which  has  ceased  to  know  any  guilt  save 
absence   of  love,  any   virtue  save    loving.      And   so 

26 


386  EUP MORION. 

serene  is  the  old  minnesiniyer's  persuasion,  that  it 
obscures  the  judgment  and  troubles  the  heart  even 
of  hi'S  reader  ;  and  we  are  tempted  to  ask  ourselves, 
on  laying-  down  the  book,  whether  indeed  this  could 
have  been  sinful,  this  love  of  Tristram  and  Yseult 
which  triumphed  over  everything  in  the  world,  and 
could  be  quenched  only  by  death.  That  circle  of  hell 
where  all  those  who  had  sinfully  loved  were  whirled 
incessantly  in  the  perse = dark,  stormy  air,  appeared 
in  the  eyes  even  of  Dante  as  a  place  less  of  punish- 
ment than  of  glory;  and,  especially  since  the  Middle 
Ages,  all  mankind  looks  upon  that  particular  hell- 
pit  with  admiration  rather  than  with  loathing.  And 
herein  consists,  more  even  than  in  any  deceptions 
practised  upon  King  Mark  or  any  ingratitude  mani- 
fested towards  Brangwaine,  the  sinfulness  of  Tristram 
and  Yseult  :  sinfulness  which  is  not  finite  like  the  in- 
'dividual  lives  which  it  offends,  but  infinite  and  im- 
mortal as  the  heart  and  the  judgment  which  it  perverts. 
For  such  a  tale,  and  so  told,  as  the  tale  of  Gottfried 
von  Strassburg,  makes  us  sympathize  with  this  fidelity 
and  devotion  of  a  man  and  woman  who  care  for 
nothing  in  the  world  save  for  each  other,  who  are 
■dragged  and  glued  together  by  the  desire  and  habit 
of  mutual  pleasure  ;  it  makes  us  admire  their  readi- 
ness to  die  rather  than  be  parted,  when  their  whole 
life  is  concentrated  in  their  reciprocal  sin,  when  their 
miserable  natures  enjoy,  care  for,  know,  only  this 
imiserable  love.    It  makes  us  wink  with  leniency  at  the 


MEDIAEVAL  LOVE.  z^y 

dishonour,  the  baseness,  the  cruelty,  to  which  all  this 
easy  virtue  is  due.  And  such  sympathy,  such  admir- 
ation, such  leniency,  for  howsoever  short  a  time  they 
may  remain  in  our  soul,  leave  it,  if  they  ever  leave  it 
completely  and  utterly,  less  strong,  less  clean  than  it 
was  before.  We  have  all  of  us  a  lazy  tendency  to 
approve  of  the  virtue  which  costs  no  trouble  ;  to 
contemplate  in  ourselves  or  others,  with  a  spurious 
moral  satisfaction,  the  development  of  this  or  that 
virtuous  quality  in  souls  which  are  deteriorating  in 
undoubted  criminal  self-indulgence.  We  have  all  of 
us,  at  the  bottom  of  our  hearts,  a  fellow  feeling  for  all 
human  affection  ;  and  the  sinfulness  of  sinners  like 
Tristram  and  Yseult  lies  largely  in  the  fact  that  they 
pervert  this  legitimate  and  holy  sympathy  into  a 
dangerous  leniency  for  any  strong  and  consistent  love, 
into  a  morbid  admiration  for  any  irresistible  mutual 
passion,  making  us  forget  that  love  has  in  itself  no 
moral  value,  and  that  while  self-indulgence  may  often 
be  innocent,  only  self-abnegation  can  ever  be  holy. 

The  great  mediaeval  German  poem  of  Tristram  and 
Yseult  remained  for  centuries  a  unique  phenomenon  ; 
only  John  Ford  perhaps,  that  grander  and  darker 
twin  spirit  of  Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  reviving,  even 
among  the  morbidly  psychological  and  crime-fascinated 
followers  of  Shakespeare,  that  new  theme  of  evil — the 
heroism  of  unlawful  love.  But  Gottfried  had  merely 
manipulated  with  precocious  analytical  power  a  mode 
of  feeling  and  thinking  which  was  universal  in  the 


388  EUPHORION. 

feudal  Middle  Ages;  the  great  epic  of  adultery  was 
forgotten,  but  the  sympathetic  and  admiring  interest 
in  illegitimate  passion  remained  ;  and  was  transmitted, 
wherever  the  Renaissance  or  the  Reformation  did  not 
break  through  such  transmission  of  mediaeval  habits, 
as  an  almost  inborn  instinct  from  father  to  son,  from 
mother  to  daughter.  And  we  may  doubt  whether  the 
important  class  of  men  and  women  who  write  and 
read  the  novels  of  illicit  love,  could  ever  have  existed, 
had  not  the  psychological  artists  of  modern  times, 
from  Rousseau  to  George  Sand,  and  from  Stendhal  to 
Octave  Feuillet,  found  ready  prepared  for  them  in  the 
countries  not  re-tempered  by  Protestantism,  an  asso- 
ciation of  romance,  heroism,  and  ideality  with  mere 
adulterous  passion,  which  was  unknown  to  the  cor- 
ruption of  Antiquity  and  to  the  lawlessness  of  the  Dark 
Ages,  and  which  remained  as  a  fatal  alloy  to  that 
legacy  of  mere  spiritual  love  which  was  left  to  the 
world  by  the  love  poets  of  early  feudalism. 

11. 

The  love  of  the  troubadours  and  minnesingers,  of 
the  Arthurian  tales,  which  show  that  love  in  narrative 
form,  was,  as  we  have  seen,  polluted  by  the  selfishness, 
the  deceitfulness,  the  many  unclean  necessities  of 
adulterous  passion.  Elevated  and  exquisite  though 
it  was,  it  could  not  really  purify  the  relations  of  man 
and  woman,  since  it  was  impure.  Nay,  we  see  that 
through  its  influence  the  grave  and  simple  married 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  389 

love  of  the  earlier  tales  of  chivalry,  the  love  of 
Siegfried  for  Chriemhilt,  of  Roland  for  his  bride  Belle 
Aude,  of  Renaud  for  his  wife  Clarisse,  is  gradually 
replaced  in  later  fiction  by  the  irregular  love-makings 
of  Huon  of  Bordeaux,  Ogier  the  Dane,  and  Artus  of 
Brittany  ;  until  we  come  at  last  to  the  extraordinary 
series  of  the  Amadis  romances,  where  every  hero 
v.'ithout  exception  is  the  bastard  of  virtuous  parents, 
who  subsequently  marry  and  discover  their  foundling  : 
a  state  of  things  which,  even  in  the  corrupt  Renais- 
sance, Boiardo  and  Ariosto  found  it  necessary  to 
reform  in  their  romantic  poems.  With  idealizing  re- 
finement, the  chivalric  love  of  the  French,  Provencal, 
and  German  poets  brings  also  a  kind  of  demoralization 
which,  from  one  point  of  view,  makes  the  spotless 
songs  of  Bernard  de  Ventadour  and  Armaud  de 
Mareulh,  of  Ulrich  von  Liechtenstein  and  Frauenlob, 
less  pure  than  the  licentious  poems  addressed  by  the 
Greeks  and  Romans  to  women  who,  at  least,  were 
not  the  wives  of  other  men. 

Shall  all  this  idealizing  refinement,  this  almost 
religious  fervour,  this  new  poetic  element  of  chivalric 
love  remain  useless  ;  or  serve  only  to  subtly  pollute 
while  pretending  to  purify  the  great  singing  passion  .'' 
Not  so.  But  to  prevent  such  waste  of  what  in  itself  is 
pure  and  precious,  is  the  mission  of  another  country, 
of  another  civilization  ;  of  a  wholly  different  cycle  of 
poets  who,  receiving  the  new  element  of  medieeval 
love  after  it  has  passed  through  and  been  sifted  by  a 


390  EUPHORION. 

.lumber  of  hands  shall  cleanse  and  recreate  it  in  the 
fire  of  intellectual  and  almost  abstract  passion,  pro- 
ducing that  wonderful  essence  of  love  which,  as  the 
juices  squeezed  by  alchemists  out  of  jewels  purified 
the  body  from  all  its  ills,  shall  purify  away  all  the 
diseases  of  the  human  soul. 

While  the  troubadours  and  minnesingers  had 
been  singing  at  the  courts  of  Angevine  kings  and 
Hohenstauffen  emperors,  of  counts  of  Toulouse  and 
dukes  of  Austria,  a  new  civilization,  a  new  political 
and  social  system,  had  gradually  been  developing  in 
the  free  burghs  of  Italy ;  a  new  life  entirely  the 
reverse  of  the  life  of  feudal  countries.  The  Italian 
cities  were  communities  of  manufacturers  and  mer- 
chants, into  which  only  gradually,  and  at  the  sacrifice 
of  every  aristocratic  privilege  and  habit,  a  certain 
number  of  originally  foreign  feudatories  v/ere  gradually 
absorbed.  Each  community  consisted  of  a  number  of 
mercantile  families,  equal  before  the  law,  and  illustrious 
or  obscure  according  to  their  talents  or  riches,  whose 
members,  instead  of  being  scattered  over  a  wide  area 
like  the  members  of  the  feudal  nobility,  were  most 
often  gathered  together  under  one  roof — sons,  brothers, 
nephews,  daughters,  sisters  and  daughters-in-law, 
forming  a  hierarchy  attending  to  the  business  of 
factory  or  counting-house  under  the  orders  of  the 
father  of  the  family,  and  to  the  economy  of  the  house 
under  the  superintendence  of  the  mother ;  a  manner 
of  living  at  once  business-like  and    patriarchal,  ex- 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  391 

pounded  by  the  interlocutors  in  Alberti's  "  Governo 
della  Famiglia,"  and  which  lasted  until  the  disso- 
lution of  the  commonwealths  and  almost  to  our  own 
times.  Such  habits  imply  a  social  organization,  an 
intercourse  between  men  and  women,  and  a  code 
of  domestic  morality  the  exact  opposite  to  those  of 
feudal  countries.  Here,  in  the  Italian  cities,  there  are 
no  young  men  bound  to  loiter,  far  from  their  homes, 
round  the  wife  of  a  military  superior,  to  whom  her 
rank  and  her  isolation  from  all  neighbours  give 
idleness  and  solitude.  The  young  men  are  all  of  them 
in  business,  usually  with  their  own  kinsfolk  ;  not  in 
their  employer's  house,  but  in  his  office  ;  they  have  no 
opportunity  of  seeing  a  woman  from  dawn  till  sunset. 
The  women,  on  their  side,  are  mainly  employed  at 
home  :  the  whole  domestic  arrangement  depends  upon 
them,  and  keeps  their  hands  constantly  full ;  working,, 
and  working  in  the  company  of  their  female  relatives 
and  friends.  Men  and  women  are  free  comparatively 
little,  and  then  they  are  free  all  together  in  the  same 
places  ;  hence  no  opportunities  for  tete-a-tcte.  Early 
Italian  poetry  is  fond  of  showing  us  the  young  poet 
reading  his  verses  or  explaining  his  passion  to  those 
gentle,  compassionate  women  learned  in  love,  of  whom 
we  meet  a  troop,  beautiful,  vague,  half-arch,  half- 
melancholy  faces,  consoling  Dante  in  the  "  Vita 
Nuova,"  and  reminding  Guido  Cavalcanti  of  his  lady 
far  off  at  Toulouse.  But  such  women  almost  invariably 
form  a  group;  they  cannot  be  approached  singly.  Such 


392  EUPHORION. 

a  state  of  society  inevitably  produces  a  high  and  strict 
morality.  In  these  early  Italian  cities  (who  have 
borrowed,  we  must  remember,  the  greater  part  of  their 
Decameronian  literature  from  France)  a  case  of  in- 
fidelity is  punished  ruthlessly  ;  the  lover  banished  or 
killed  ;  the  wife  for  ever  lost  to  the  world,  perhaps 
condemned  to  solitude  and  a  lingering  death  in  the 
fever  tracts,  like  Pia  dei  Tolomei.  A  complacent 
deceived  husband  is  even  more  ridiculous  (the  deceived 
husband  is  notoriously  the  chief  laughing  stock  of 
all  mediaeval  free  towns)  than  is  a  jealous  husband 
among  the  authorized  and  recognized  cicisbeos  of  a 
feudal  court.  Indeed  the  respect  for  marriage  vows 
inevitable  in  this  busy  democratic  mediaeval  life  is 
so  strong,  that  long  after  the  commonwealths  have 
turned  into  despotisms,  and  every  social  tie  has  been 
dissolved  in  the  Renaissance,  the  wives  and  daughters 
of  men  stained  with  every  libidinous  vice,  nay,  of  the 
very  despots  themselves — Tiberiuses  and  Neros  on  a 
smaller  scale — remain  spotless  in  the  midst  of  evil  ; 
and  authorized  adultery  begins  in  Italy  only  under 
the  Spanish  rule  in  the  late  sixteenth  century. 

Such  were  the  manners  and  morals  of  the  Italian 
commonwealths  when,  about  the  middle  of  the  thir- 
teenth century,  the  men  of  Tuscany,  now  free  and 
prosperous,  suddenly  awoke  to  the  consciousness  that 
they  had  a  soul  which  desired  song,  and  a  language 
which  was  spontaneously  singing.  It  was  the  moment 
when  painting  was  beginning  to  claim  for  the  figures 
of  real  men  and  women  the  walls  and  vaulted  spaces 


MEDIAEVAL  LOVE.  393 

whence  had  hitherto  glowered,  with  vacant  faces  and 
huge  ghostlike  eyes, mosaic  figures,  from  their  shimmer- 
ing golden  ground  ;  the  moment  when  the  Pisan  artists 
had  sculptured  solemnly  draped  madonnas  and  kings 
not  quite  unworthy  of  the  carved  sarcophagi  which 
stood  around  them  ;  the  moment  when,  merging 
together  old  Byzantine  traditions  and  Northern  ex- 
amples, the  architects  of  Florence,  Siena,  and  Orvieto 
■conceived  a  style  which  made  cathedrals  into  mar- 
vellous and  huge  reliquaries  of  marble,  jasper,  alabaster, 
and  mosaics.  The  mediaeval  flowering  time  had  come 
late,  very  late,  in  Italy  ;  but  the  atmosphere  was  only 
the  warmer,  the  soil  the  richer,  and  Italy  put  forth  a 
-succession  of  exquisite  and  superb  immortal  flowers 
•of  art  when  the  artistic  sap  of  other  countries  had 
begun  to  be  exhausted.  But  the  Italians,  the  Tuscans, 
audacious  in  the  other  arts,  were  diffident  of  them- 
selves with  regard  to  poetry.  Architecture,  painting, 
sculpture,  had  been  the  undisputed  field  for  plebeian 
craftsmen,  belonging  exclusively  to  the  free  burghs 
and  disdained  by  the  feudal  castles  ;  but  poetry  was 
essentially  the  aristocratic,  the  feudal  art,  cultivated 
'by  knights  and  cultivated  for  kings  and  barons.  It 
was  probably  an  unspoken  sense  of  this  fact  which 
•caused  the  early  Tuscan  poets  to  misgive  their  own 
powers  and  to  turn  wistfully  and  shyly  towards  the 
poets  of  Provence  and  of  Sicily.  There,  beyond  the 
seas,  under  the  last  lords  of  Toulouse  and  the  brilliant 
mongrel  Hohenstauffen  princes,  were  courts,  knights, 
and  ladies  ;  there  was  the  tradition  of  this  courtly  art 


394  EUPHORION. 

of  poetry  ;  and  there  only  could  the  sons  of  Florentine 
or  Sienese  merchants,  clodhoppers  in  gallantry  and 
song,  hope  to  learn  the  correct  style  of  thing.  Hence 
the  history  of  the  Italian  lyric  before  Dante  is  the 
history  of  a  series  of  transformations  which  connect  a 
style  of  poetry  absolutely  feudal  and  feudally  immoral, 
with  the  hitherto  unheard-of  platonic  love  subtleties 
of  the  "  Vita  Nuova."  And  it  is  curious,  in  looking 
over  the  collections  of  early  Italian  lyrists,  to  note  the 
alteration  in  tone  as  Sicily  and  the  feudal  courts  are 
left  further  and  further  behind.  Ciullo  d'  Alcamo^ 
flourishing  about  1190,  is  the  only  Italian-writing 
poet  absolutely  contemporaneous  with  the  earlier  and 
better  trouveres,  troubadours,  and  minnesingers  ;  and 
he  is  also  the  only  one  who  resembles  them  very 
closely.  His  famous  tenso,  beginning  "  Rosa  fresca 
aulentissima  "  (a  tolerably  faithful  translation  heads 
the  beautiful  collection  of  the  late  Mr.  D.  G.  Rossetti), 
is  indeed  more  explicitly  gross  and  immoral  than  the 
majority  of  Provencal  and  German  love-songs  :  loose 
as  are  many  of  the  albas,  serenas,  zvaclitlieder,  and 
even  many  of  the  less  special  forms  of  German  and 
Provengal  poetry,  I  am  acquainted  with  none  of  them 
which  comes  up  to  this  singular  dialogue,  in  which  a 
man,  refusing  to  marry  a  woman,  little  by  little  wins 
her  over  to  his  wishes  and  makes  her  brazenly  invite 
him  to  her  dishonour.  Between  Ciullo  d'  Alcamo 
and  his  successors  there  is  some  gap  of  time,  and  a 
corresponding  want  of  gradation.     Yet  the  Sicilian 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  39- 

poets  of  the  courts  of  Hohenstauffen  and  Anjou. 
recognizable  by  their  name  or  the  name  of  their  town, 
Inghilfredi,  Manfredi,  Ranieri  and  Ruggierone  da 
Palermo,  Tommaso  and  Matteo  da  Messina,  Gugliel- 
motto  d'  Otranto,  Rinaldo  d'Aquino,  Pier  delle  Vigne, 
either  maintain  altogether  unchanged  the  tone  of  the 
troubadours,  or  only  gradually,  as  in  the  remarkable 
case  of  the  Notar}-  of  Lentino,  approximate  to  the 
platonic  poets  of  Tuscany.  The  songs  of  the  arche- 
type of  Sicilian  singers,  the  Emperor  Frederick  II., 
are  completely  Provencal  in  feeling  as  in  form,  though 
infinitely  inferior  in  execution.  With  him  it  is  always 
the  pleasure  which  he  hopes  from  his  lady,  or  the 
pleasure  which  he  has  had — "  Quando  ambidue  sta- 
vamo  in  allegranza  alia  dolce  fera  ;  "  "Pregovi  donna 
mia — Per  vostra  cortesia — E  pregovi  che  sia — Quelle 
che  lo  core  disia."  Again  :  "  Sospiro  e  sto  in  rancura 
— Ch'  io  son  si  disioso — E  pauroso — Mi  fate  penare — 
Ma  tanto  m'  assicura — Lo  suo  viso  amoroso — E  lo 
gioioso — Riso  e  lo  sguardare — E  lo  parlare — Di  questa 
criatura — Che  per  paura — Mi  face  penare — E  di- 
morare — Tant'  h  fina  e  pura  —  Tanto  e  saggia  e 
cortese — Non  credo  che  pensasse — Ne  distornasse — 
Di  cio  che  m'  impromise."  It  is,  this  earliest  Italian 
poetry,  like  the  more  refined  poetry  of  troubadours 
and  minnesingers,  eminently  an  importuning  of  high- 
born but  loosely  living  women.  From  Sicily  and 
Apulia  poetry  goes  first,  as  might  be  expected  (and 
as   probably   sculpture   went)    to    the   seaport    Pisa, 


396  EUPHORION. 

thence  to  the  neighbouring  Lucca,  considerably  before 
reaching  Florence.  And  as  it  becomes  more  Italian 
and  urban,  it  becomes  also,  under  the  strict  vigilance 
of  burgher  husbands,  considerably  more  platonic.  In 
Bologna,  the  city  of  jurists,  it  acquires  (the  remark  is 
not  mine  merely,  but  belongs  also  to  Carducci)  the 
very  strong  flavour  of  legal  quibbling  which  distin- 
guishes the  otherwise  charming  Guido  GuinicelH  ; 
and  once  in  Florence,  among  the  most  subtle  of  all 
subtle  Tuscans,  it  becomes  at  once  what  it  remained 
even  for  Dante,  saturated  with  metaphysics :  the 
woman  is  no  longer  paramount,  she  is  subordinated 
to  Love  himself;  to  that  personified  abstraction  Amor, 
the  serious  and  melancholy  son  of  Pagan  philosophy 
and  Christian  mysticism.  The  Tuscans  had  imported 
from  Provence  and  Sicily  the  new  element  of  medi- 
aeval love,  of  life  devotion,  soul  absorption  in  loving ; 
if  they  would  sing,  they  must  sing  of  this  ;  any  other 
kind  of  love,  at  a  time  when  Italy  still  read  and 
relished  her  would-be  Provengals,  Lanfranc  Cicala  and 
Sordel  of  Mantua,  would  have  been  unfashionable  and 
unendurable.  But  in  these  Italian  commonwealths, 
as  we  have  seen,  poets  are  forced,  nilly-willy,  to  be 
platonic ;  an  importuning  poem  found  in  her  work- 
basket  may  send  a  Tuscan  lady  into  a  convent,  or, 
like  Pia,  into  the  Maremma  ;  an  alba  or  a  serena 
interrupted  by  a  wool-weaver  of  Calimara  or  a  silk 
spinner  of  Lucca,  may  mean  that  the  imprudent  poet 
be  found  weltering  in  blood  under  some  archway  the 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  ^97 

next  morning.  The  chivalric  sentimentality  of  feu- 
dalism must  be  restrained  ;  and  little  by  little,  under 
the  pressure  of  such  very  different  social  habits, 
it  grows  into  a  veritable  platonic  passion.  Poets  must 
sing,  and  in  order  that  they  sing,  they  must  adore  ; 
so  men  actually  begin  to  seek  out,  and  adore  and 
make  themselves  happy  and  wretched  about  women 
from  whom  they  can  hope  only  social  distinctions  ; 
and  this  purely  aesthetic  passion  goes  on  by  the  side, 
nay,  rather  on  the  top,  of  their  humdrum,  conjugal 
life  or  loosest  libertinage.  Petrarch's  bastards  were 
born  during  the  reign  of  Madonna  Laura  ;  and  that 
they  should  have  been,  was  no  more  a  slight  or 
infidelity  to  her  than  to  the  other  Madonna,  the  one 
in  heaven.  Laura  had  a  right  to  only  ideal  sentiments, 
ideal  relations  ;  the  poet  was  at  liberty  to  carry  more 
material  preferences  elsewhere. 

But  could  such  love  as  this  exist,  could  it  be 
genuine  ?  To  my  mind,  indubitably.  For  there  is, 
in  all  our  perceptions  and  desires  of  physical  and 
moral  beauty,  an  element  of  passion  which  is  akin  to 
love  ;  and  there  is,  in  all  love  that  is  not  mere  lust,  a. 
perception  of,  a  craving  for,  beauty,  real  or  imaginary 
which  is  identical  with  our  merely  aesthetic  per- 
ceptions and  cravings  ;  hence  the  possibility,  once  the 
wish  for  such  a  passion  present,  of  a  kind  of  love 
which  is  mainly  sesthetic,  which  views  the  beloved 
as  gratifying  merely  to  the  wish  for  physical  or  spiri- 
tual loveliness,  and  concentrates  upon  one  exquisite 


398  EUPHORION. 

reality  all  dreams  of  ideal  perfection.  Moreover  there 
comes,  to  all  nobler  natures,  a  love  dawning :  a 
brightening  and  delicate  flushing  of  the  soul  before 
the  actual  appearance  of  the  beloved  one  above  the 
horizon,  which  is  as  beautiful  and  fascinating  in  its 
very  clearness,  pallor,  and  coldness,  as  the  unearthly 
purity  of  the  pale  amber  and  green  and  ashy  rose 
which  streaks  the  heavens  before  sunrise.  The  love 
of  the  early  Tuscan  poets  (for  we  must  count  Gui- 
nicelli,  in  virtue  of  his  language,  as  a  Tuscan)  had 
been  restrained,  by  social  necessities  first,  then  by 
habit  and  deliberate  aesthetic  choice,  within  the  limits 
•of  this  dawning  state  ;  and  in  this  state,  it  had  fed 
itself  off  mere  spiritual  food,  and  acquired  the  strange 
intensity  of  mere  intellectual  passions.  We  give 
excessive  weight,  in  our  days,  to  spontaneity  in  all 
things,  apt  to  think  that  only  the  accidental,  the  un- 
sought, can  be  vital  ;  but  it  is  true  in  many  things,  and 
truest  in  all  matters  of  the  imagination  and  the  heart, 
that  the  desire  to  experience  any  sentiment  will  power- 
fully conduce  to  its  production,  and  even  give  it  a 
strength  due  to  the  long  incubation  of  the  wish.  Thus 
the  ideal  love  of  the  Tuscan  poets  was  probably  norve 
the  weaker,  but  rather  the  stronger,  for  the  desire 
which  they  felt  to  sing  such  passion  ;  nay,  rather  to  hear 
it  singing  in  themselves.  The  love  of  man  and  wife, 
of  bride  and  bridegroom,  was  still  of  the  domain  of 
prose ;  adulterous  love  forbidden  ;  and  the  tradition 
of,  the  fervent  wish  for,  the  romantic  passion  of  the 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  399 

troubadours  consumed  them  as  a  strong  artistic 
craving.  Platonic  love  was  possible,  doubly  possible 
in  souls  tense  with  poetic  wants  ;  it  became  a  reality 
through  the  strength  of  the  wish  for  it. 

Nor  was  this  all.  In  all  imaginative  passions,  intel- 
lectual motives  are  so  much  fuel  ;  and  in  this  case  the 
necessity  of  logically  explaining  the  bodiless  passion 
for  a  platonic  lady,  of  understanding  why  they  felt  in 
a  manner  so  hitherto  unknown  to  gross  mankind, 
tended  greatly  to  increase  the  love  of  these  Tuscans, 
and  to  bring  it  in  its  chastity  to  the  pitch  of  fervour  of 
more  fleshly  passions,  by  mingling  with  the  aesthetic 
emotions  already  in  their  souls  the  mystical  theorizings 
of  transcendental  metaphysics,  and  the  half-human, 
half-supernatural  ecstasy  of  mediaeval  religion.  For 
we  must  remember  that  Italy  was  a  country  not 
merely  of  manufacturers  and  bankers,  but  of  philo- 
sophers also  and  of  saints. 

Among  the  Italians  of  the  thirteenth  century  the 
revival  of  antique  literature  was  already  in  full  swing; 
while  in  France,  Germany,  and  Provence  there  had 
been,  in  lyric  poetry  at  least,  no  trace  of  classic  lore. 
Whereas  the  trouveres  and  troubadours  had  possessed 
but  the  light  intellectual  luggage  of  a  military  aristo- 
cracy ;  and  the  minnesingers  had,  for  the  most  part, 
•been  absolutely  ignorant  of  reading  and  writing 
(Wolfram  says  so  of  himself,  and  Ulrich  von  Liechten- 
stein relates  how  he  carried  about  his  lady's  lettei 
for  da}'s    unread  until  the   return  of  his  secretary)  . 


400  EUPHORION. 

the  poets  of  Italy,  from  Brunetto  Latini  to  Petrarch, 
were    eminently   scholars  ;    men    to   whom,  however 
much  they  might  be  politicians  and  ringleaders,  like 
Cavalcanti,    Donati,  and  Dante,  whatever  existed  of 
antique  learning  was  thoroughly  well  known.     Such 
men  were  familiar  with  whatever  yet  survived  of  the 
transcendental   theories  of  Plato  and  Plotinus  ;  and 
they  seized  at  once  upon  the  mythic  metaphysics  of 
an  antenatal  condition,  of  typical  ideas,  of  the  divine 
essence  of  beauty,  on  all  the  mystic  discussions    on 
love  and  on  the  soul,  as  a  philosophical  explanation  of 
their  seemingly  inexplicablepassion  for  an  unapproach- 
able woman.     The  lady  upon  whom  the  poetic  fervour, 
the  mediaeval  love,  inherited  from  Provence  and  France,^ 
was  now  expended,  and  whom  social  reasons  placed  quite 
beyond  the  reach  of  anything  save  the  poet's  soul  and 
words,  was  evidently  beloved  for  the  sake  of  that  much 
of  the  divine  essence  contained  in  her  nature  ;  she  was 
loved  for  purely  spiritual  reasons,  loved  as  a  visible 
and  living  embodiment   of  virtue  and  beauty,  as  a 
human  piece  of  the  godhead.     So  far,  therefore,  from 
such  an  attachment  being  absurd,  as  absurd  it  would 
have  seemed  to  troubadours  and  minnesingers,  who 
never  served  a  lady  save  for  what  they  called  a  reward  ; 
it  became,  in  the  eyes  of  these  platonizing  Italians, 
the  triumph  of  the  well-bred  soul ;  and  as  such,  soon 
after,  a  necessary  complement  to  dignities,  talents,  and 
wealth,  the  very  highest  occupation  of  a  liberal  mind. 
Thus  did  their  smattering  of  platonic  and  neo-platonic 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  40T 

philosophy  supply  the  Tuscan  poets  with  a  logical 
reality  for  this  otherwise  unreal  passion. 

But  there  was  something  more.  In  this  democratic 
and  philosophizing  Italy,  there  was  not  the  gulf  which 
separated  the  chivalric  poets,  men  of  the  sword  and 
not  of  books,  from  the  great  world  of  religious  mysti- 
cism ;  for,  though  the  minnesingers  especially  were 
extremely  devout  and  sang  many  a  strange  love-song 
to  the  Virgin  ;  they  knew,  they  could  know,  nothing 
of  the  contemplative  religion  of  Eckhardt  and  his 
disciples — humble  and  transcendental  spirits,  whose 
words  were  treasured  by  the  sedentary,  dreamy  towns- 
folk of  the  Rhine,  but  would  have  conveyed  no 
meaning  even  to  the  poet  of  the  Grail  epic,  with  its 
battles  and  feasts,  its  booted  and  spurred  slapdash 
morality,  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach.  In  the  great 
manufacturing  cities  of  Italy,  such  religious  mysti- 
cism spread  as  it  could  never  spread  in  feudal  courts  ; 
it  became  familiar,  both  in  the  mere  passionate  ser- 
mons and  songs  of  the  wandering  friars,  and  in  the 
subtle  dialectics  of  the  divines;  above  all,  it  became 
familiar  to  the  poets.  Now  the  essence  of  this 
contemplative  theology  of  the  Middle  Ages,  which 
triumphantly  held  its  own  against  the  cut-and-dry 
argumentation  of  scholastic  rationalism,  was  love. 
Love  which  assuredly  meant  different  things  to  diffe- 
rent minds ;  a  passionate  benevolence  towards  man  and 
beast  to  godlike  simpletons  like  Francis  of  Assisi  ;  a 

mere  creative  and  impassive  activity  of  the  divinity  to 
27 


402  EUPHORION. 

deep-seeing  (so  deep  as  to  see  only  their  own  strange 
passionate  eyes  and  lips  reflected  in  the  dark  well  of 
knowledge)  and  almost  pantheistic  thinkers  like 
Master  Eckhardt;  but  love  nevertheless,  love.  "Amor, 
amore,  ardo  d'  amore,"  St.  Francis  had  sung  in  a  wild 
rhapsody,  a  sort  of  mystic  dance,  a  kind  of  furious 
malagiiena  of  divine  love ;  and  that  he  who  would 
wish  to  know  God,  let  him  love — "  Qui  vult  habere 
notitiam  Dei,  amet,"  had  been  written  by  Hugo  of 
St.  Victor,  one  of  the  subtlest  of  all  the  mystics. 
"Amor  oculus  est,"  said  Master  Eckhardt;  love,  love — 
was  not  love  then  the  highest  of  all  human  faculties, 
and  must  not  the  act  of  loving,  of  perceiving  God's 
essence  in  some  creature  which  had  virtue,  the  soul's 
beauty,  and  beauty,  the  body's  virtue,  be  the  noblest 
business  of  a  noble  life  ?  Thus  argued  the  poets  ;  and 
their  argument,  half-passionate,  half-scholastic,  mixing 
Plato  and  Bonaventura,  the  Schools  of  Alexandria 
and  the  Courts  of  Love  of  Provence,  resulted  in  adding 
all  the  fervid  reality  of  philosophical  and  religious 
aspiration  to  their  clear  and  cold  phantom  of  disem- 
bodied love  of  woman. 

Little  by  little  therefore,  together  with  the  carnal 
desires  of  Provencals  and  Sicilians,  the  Tuscan  poets 
put  behind  them  those  little  coquetries  of  style  and 
manner,  complications  of  metre  and  rhythm  learned 
and  fantastic  as  a  woman's  plaited  and  braided  hair ; 
those  metaphors  and  similes,  like  bright  flowers  or 
shining  golden  ribbons  dropped  from  the  lady's  bosom 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  403 

and  head  and  eagerly  snatched  by  the  lover,  which  we 
still  find,  curiously  transformed  and  scented  with  the 
rosemary  and  thyme  of  country  lanes,  in  the  peasant 
poetry  of  modern  Tuscany.  Little  by  little  does  the 
love  poetry  of  the  Italians  reject  such  ornaments  ;  and 
cloth  itself  in  that  pale  garment,  pale  and  stately  in 
heavy  folds  like  a  nun's  or  friar's  weeds,  but  pure  and 
radiant  and  solemn  as  the  garment  of  some  painted 
angel,  which  we  have  all  learned  to  know  from  the 
"Vita  Nuova." 

To  describe  this  poetry  of  the  immediate  precursors 
and  contemporaries  of  Dante  is  to  the  last  degree 
difficult :  it  can  be  described  only  by  symbols,  and 
symbols  can  but  mislead  us.  Dante  Rossetti  himself, 
after  translating  with  exquisite  beauty  the  finest  poems 
of  this  school,  showed  how  he  had  read  into  them  his 
own  spirit,  when  he  drew  the  beautiful  design  for  the 
frontispiece  of  his  collection.  These  two  lovers — the 
youth  kneeling  in  his  cloth  of  silver  robe,  lifting  his 
long  throbbing  neck  towards  the  beloved  ;  the  lady 
stooping  down  towards  him,  raising  him  up  and  kiss- 
ing him  ;  the  mingled  cloud  of  waving  hair,  the  four 
tight-clasped  hands,  the  four  tightly  glued  lips,  the 
profile  hidden  by  the  profile,  the  passion  and  the 
pathos,  the  eager,  wistful  faces,  nay,  the  very  splendour 
of  brocade  robes  and  jewels,  the  very  sweetness  of 
blooming  rose  spaliers  ;  all  this  is  suitable  to  illustrate 
this  group  of  sonnets  or  that  of  the  "  House  of  Life  ;" 
but  it  is  false,  false  in  efflorescence  and  luxuriance  of 


404  EUPHORION. 

passion,  splendour  and  colour  of  accessory,  to  the 
poetry  of  these  early  Tuscans.  Imaginative  their 
poetry  certainly  is,  and  passionate  ;  indeed  the  very 
concentration  of  imaginative  passion  ;  but  imagination 
and  passion  unlike  those  of  all  other  poets  ;  perhaps 
because  more  rigorously  reduced  to  their  elements  : 
imagination  purely  of  the  heart,  passion  purely  of  the 
intellect,  neither  of  the  senses  :  love  in  its  most  essen- 
tial condition,  but,  just  because  an  essence,  purged  of 
earthly  alloys,  rarefied,  sublimated  into  a  cultus  or  a. 
philosophy. 

These  poems  might  nearly  all  have  been  written  by 
one  man,  were  it  possible  for  one  man  to  vary  from 
absolute  platitude  to  something  like  genius,  so  homo- 
geneous is  their  tone  :  everywhere  do  we  meet  the  same 
simplicity  of  diction  struggling  with  the  same  compli- 
cation and  subtlety  of  thought,  the  same  abstract  spe- 
culation strangely  mingled  with  most  individual  and 
personal  pathos.  The  mode  of  thinking  and  feeling,, 
the  conception  of  all  the  large  characteristics  of  love,, 
and  of  all  its  small  incidents  are,  in  this  cycle  of  poets,, 
constantly  the  same  ;  and  they  are  the  same  in  the 
"Vita  Nuova;"  Dante  having,  it  would  seem,  invented 
and  felt  nothing  unknown  to  his  immediate  prede- 
cessors and  contemporaries,  but  merely  concentrated 
their  thoughts  and  feelings  by  the  greater  intenseness 
of  his  genius.  This  platonic  love  of  Dante's  days  is, 
as  I  have  said,  a  passion  sublimated  into  a  philosophy 
and  a  cultus.     The  philosophy  of  love  engages  mucb 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  405 

of  these  poets'  attention  ;  all  have  treated  of  it,  but 
Guido  Cavalcanti,  Dante's  elder  brother  in  poetry,  is 
love's  chief  theologian.  He  explains,  as  Eckhardt  or 
Bonaventura  might  explain  the  mysteries  of  God's 
being  and  will,  the  nature  and  operation  of  love. 
"  Love,  which  enamours  us  of  excellence,  arises  out 
of  pure  virtue  of  the  soul,  and  equals  us  to  God,"  he 
tells  us  ;  and  subtly  developes  his  theme.  This  being 
the  case,  nothing  can  be  more  mistaken  than  to  sup- 
pose, as  do  those  of  little  sense,  that  Love  is  blind, 
and  goes  blindly  about  ("  Da  sentir  poco,  e  da  credenza 
vana — Si  move  il  dir  di  cotal  grossa  gente — Ch'  amor 
fa  cieco  andar  per  lo  suo  regno  ").  Love  is  omniscient, 
since  love  is  born  of  the  knowledge  and  recognition 
of  excellence.  Such  love  as  this  is  the  only  true 
source  of  happiness,  since  it  alone  raises  man  to  the 
level  of  the  divinity.  Cavalcanti  has  in  him  not  merely 
the  subtlety  but  the  scornfulness  of  a  great  divine. 
His  wrath  against  all  those  who  worship  or  defend 
a  different  god  of  Love  knows  no  bounds.  "  I  know 
not  what  to  say  of  him  who  adores  the  goddess  born 
of  Saturn  and  sea-foam.  His  love  is  fire  :  it  seems, 
sweet,  but  its  result  is  bitter  and  evil.  He  may  indeed 
call  himself  happy  ;  but  in  such  delights  he  mingles 
himself  with  much  baseness."  Such  is  this  god  of 
Love,  who,  when  he  descended  into  Dante's  heart, 
caused  the  spirit  of  life  to  tremble  terribly  in  his 
secret  chamber,  and  trembling  to  cry,  "  Lo,  here  is  a 
god  stronger  than  myself,  who  coming  will  rule  over 


4o6  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

me.  Ecce  Deus  fortior  me,  qui  veniens  dominabitur 
mihi!" 

The  god,  this  chaste  and  formidable  archangel 
Amor,  is  the  true  subject  of  these  poets'  adoration  ; 
the  woman  into  whom  he  descends  by  a  mystic 
miracle  of  beauty  and  of  virtue  becomes  hencefor- 
vv^ard  invested  with  somewhat  of  his  awful  radiance. 
She  is  a  gentle,  gracious  lady  ;  a  lovable  and  loving 
woman,  in  describing  whose  grey-green  eyes  and 
colour  as  of  snow  tinted  with  pomegranate,  the  older 
Tuscans  would  fain  linger,  comparing  her  to  the  new- 
budded  rose,  to  the  morning  star,  to  the  golden  summer 
air,  to  the  purity  of  snowflakes  falling  silently  in  a 
serene  sky  ;  but  the  sense  of  the  divinity  residing 
within  her  becomes  too  strong.  From  her  eyes  dart 
spirits  who  strike  awe  into  the  heart  ;  from  her  lips 
come  words  which  make  men  sigh  ;  on  her  passage 
the  poet  casts  down  his  eyes  ;  notions,  all  these,  with 
which  we  are  familiar  from  the  "  Vita  Nuova  ; "  but 
which  belong  to  Cavalcanti,  Lapo  Gianni,  nay,  even 
to  Guinicelli,  quite  as  much  as  to  Dante.  The  poet 
bids  his  verse  go  forth  to  her,  but  softly  ;  and  stand 
before  her  with  bended  head,  as  before  the  Mother  of 
God.  She  is  a  miracle  herself,  a  thing  sent  from 
heaven,  a  spirit,  as  Dante  says  in  that  most  beautiful 
of  all  his  sonnets,  the  summing  up  of  all  that  the 
poets  of  his  circle  had  said  of  their  lady — "  Tanto 
gentile  e  tanto  onesta  pare." 

"  She   passes   along   the   street   so    beautiful    and 


MEDL'EVAL  LOVE.  407 

gracious,"  says  Guinicelli,  "that  she  humbles  pride  in 
all  whom  she  greets,  and  makes  him  of  our  faith  if  he- 
does  not  yet  believe.     And  no  base  man  can  come 
into  her  presence.     And  I  will  tell  you  another  virtue 
of  her:  no  man  can  think  ought  of  evil  as  long  as  he 
looks  upon  her."     "  The  noble  mind  which  I  feel,  on 
account  of  this  youthful  lady  who  has  appeared,  makes 
me  despise  baseness  and  vileness,"  says  Lapo  Gianni. 
The  women   who   surround   her  are  glorified   in   her 
glory,  glorified  in  their  womanhood  and  companionship 
with  her.     "  The  ladies  around  you,"  says  Cavalcanti, 
"  are  dear  to  me  for  the  sake  of  your  love  ;  and  I  pray 
them  as  they  are  courteous,  that  they  should  do  you 
all  honour."     She  is,  indeed,  scarcely  a  woman,  and 
something  more  than  a  saint :  an  avatar,  an  incarna- 
tion of  that  Amor  who  is  born  of  virtue  and  beauty, 
and  raises  men's  minds  to  heaven  ;  and  when  Caval- 
canti speaks  of  his  lady's  portrait  behind  the  blazing 
tapers  of  Orsanmichele,  it  seems  but  natural  that  she 
should  be  on  an  altar,  in  the  Madonna's  place.     The 
idea  of  a  mysterious  incarnation  of  love  in  the  lady, 
or  of  a  mystic  relationship  between    her   and    love,  , 
returns  to  these  poets.    Lapo  Gianni  tells  us  first  that 
she  is  Amor's  sister,  then  speaks  of  her  as  Amor's 
bride  ;    nay,  in  this  love  theology  of  the  thirteenth 
century,  arises  the  same  kind  of  confusion  as  in  the 
mystic  disputes  of  the  nature  of  the  Godhead.     A 
Sienese  poet,  Ugo  da  Massa,  goes  so  far  as  to  say, 
"Amor  and  I  are  all  one  thing ;  and  we  have  one  will 


.;o8  EUPHORION. 

and  one  heart  ;  and  if  I  were  not,  Amor  were  not  ; 
mind  you,  do  not  think  I  am  saying  these  things  from 
subtlety  ('e  non  pensate  ch'  io  '1  dica  per  arte')  ;  for 
certainly  it  is  true  that  I  am  love,  and  he  who  should 
slay  me  would  slay  love." 

Together  with  the  knowledge  of  public  life  and  of 
scholastic  theories,  together  with  the  love  of  occult 
and  cabalistic  science,  and  the  craft  of  Provengal 
poetry,  Dante  received  from  his  Florence  of  the 
thirteenth  century  the  knowledge  of  this  new,  this 
exotic  and  esoteric  intellectual  love.  And,  as  it  is 
the  mission  of  genius  to  gather  into  an  undying  whole, 
to  model  into  a  perfect  form,  the  thoughts  and  feelings 
and  perceptions  of  the  less  highly  endowed  men 
who  surround  it,  so  Dante  moulded  out  of  the  love 
passion  and  love  philosophy  of  his  day  the  "  Vita 
Nuova."  Whether  the  story  narrated  in  this  book  is 
fact ;  whether  a  real  woman  whom  he  called  Beatrice 
ever  existed  ;  some  of  those  praiseworthy  persons,  who 
prowl  in  the  charnel-house  of  the  past,  and  put  its 
poor  fleshless  bones  into  the  acids  and  sublimates  of 
their  laboratory,  have  gravely  doubted.  But  such 
doubts  cannot  affect  us.  For  if  the  story  of  the  "  Vita 
Nuova "  be  a  romance,  and  if  Beatrice  be  a  mere 
romance  heroine,  the  real  meaning  and  value  of  the 
book  does  not  change  in  our  eyes  ;  since,  to  concoct 
such  a  tale,  Dante  must  have  had  a  number  of  real 
experiences  which  are  fully  the  tale's  equivalent ;  and 
to  conceive  and  create  such  a  figure  as  Beatrice,  and 


MEDL-EVAL  LOVE.  409 

€udi  a  passion  as  she  inspires  her  poet,  he  must  have 
felt  as  a  poignant  reality  the  desire  for  such  a  lady, 
the  capacity  for  such  a  love.  A  tale  merely  of  the 
soul,  and  of  the  soul's  movements  and  actions,  this 
"  Vita  Nuova  ;  "  so  why  should  it  matter  if  that  which 
could  never  exist  save  in  the  spirit,  should  have  been 
but  the  spirit's  creation  ?  It  is,  in  its  very  intensity,  a 
vision  of  love  ;  what  if  it  be  a  vision  merely  conceived 
and  never  realized  ?  Hence  the  futility  of  all  those 
who  wish  to  destroy  our  faith  and  pleasure  by  saying 
"  all  this  never  took  place."  Fools,  can  you  tell  what 
did  or  did  not  take  place  in  a  poet's  mind  ?  Be  this 
as  it  may,  the  "  Vita  Nuova,"  thank  heaven,  exists  ; 
and,  thank  heaven,  exists  as  a  reality  to  our  feelings. 
The  longed-for  ideal,  the  perfection  whose  love,  said 
Cavalcanti,  raises  us  up  to  God,  has  seemed  to  gather 
itself  into  a  human  shape  ;  and  a  real  being  has  been 
surrounded  by  the  halo  of  perfection  emanated  from 
the  poet's  own  soul.  The  vague  visions  of  glory  have 
suddenly  taken  body  in  this  woman,  seen  rarely,  at  a 
distance  ;  the  woman  whom,  as  a  child,  the  poet, 
himself  a  child,  had  already  looked  at  with  the  strange, 
ideal  fascination  which  we  sometimes  experience  in 
our  childhood.  People  are  apt  to  smile  at  this  opening 
of  the  "  Vita  Nuova  ; "  to  put  aside  this  narrative  of 
childish  love  together  with  the  pathetic  little  pedan- 
tries of  learned  poetry  and  Kabbala,  of  the  long  gloses 
to  each  poem,  and  the  elaborate  calculations  of  the 
recurrence  and  combination  of  the  number  nine  I'and 


4IO  EUPHORION, 

that  curious  little  bit  of  encyclopaedic  display  about 
the  Syrian  month  Tisinin)  as  so  much  pretty  local 
colouring  or  obsolete  silliness.  But  there  is  nothing 
at  which  to  laugh  in  such  childish  fascinations  ;  the 
wonderful,  the  perfect,  is  more  open  to  us  as  children 
than  it  is  afterwards  :  a  word,  a  picture,  a  snatch  of 
music  will  have  for  us  an  ineffable, mysterious  meaning; 
and  how  much  more  so  some  human  being,  often  some 
other,  more  brilliant  child  from  whose  immediate 
contact  we  are  severed  by  some  circumstance,  perhaps 
by  our  own  consciousness  of  inferiority,  which  makes 
that  other  appear  strangely  distant,  above  us,  moving 
in  a  world  of  glory  which  we  scarcely  hope  to  ap- 
proach ;  a  child  sometimes,  or  sometimes  some 
grown  person,  beautiful,  brilliant,  who  sings  or  talks 
or  looks  at  us,  the  child,  with  ways  which  we  do  not 
understand,  like  some  fairy  or  goddess.  No  indeed,. 
there  is  nothing  to  laugh  at  in  this,  in  this  first 
blossoming  of  that  love  for  higher  and  more  beautiful 
things,  which  in  most  of  us  is  trodden  down,  left  to 
wither,  by  our  maturer  selves  ;  nothing  to  make  us 
laugh ;  nay,  rather  to  make  us  sigh  that  later  on  we 
see  too  well,  see  others  too  much  on  their  real  level, 
scrutinize  too  much  ;  too  much,  alas,  for  what  at  best 
is  but  an  imperfect  creature.  And  in  this  state  of 
fascination  does  the  child  Dante  see  the  child  Beatrice^ 
as  a  strange,  glorious  little  vision  from  a  childish 
sphere  quite  above  him ;  treasuring  up  that  vision,  till 
with  his  growth  it  expands  and  grows  more  beautiful 


MEDLEVAL  LOVE.  411 

and  noble,  but  none  the  less  fascinating  and  full  of 
awfulness.  When,  therefore,  the  grave  young  poet, 
full  of  the  yearning  for  Paradise  fbut  Paradise  vaguer, 
sweeter,  less  metaphysic  and  theological  than  the 
Paradise  of  his  manhood)  ;  as  yet  but  a  gracious, 
learned  youth,  his  terrible  moral  muscle  still  un- 
developed by  struggle,  the  noble  and  delicate  dreamer 
of  Giotto's  fresco,  with  the  long,  thin,  almost  womanish 
face,  marked  only  by  dreamy  eyes  and  lips,  wandering 
through  this  young  Florence  of  the  Middle  Ages — 
when,  I  say,  he  meets  after  long  years,  the  noble  and 
gentle  woman,  serious  and  cheerful  and  candid  ;  and 
is  told  that  she  is  that  same  child  who  was  the  quee, 
and  goddess  of  his  childish  fancies  ;  then  the  vague 
glory  with  which  his  soul  is  filled  expands  and  en- 
wraps the  beloved  figure,  so  familiar  and  yet  so  new. 
And  the  blood  retreats  from  his  veins,  and  he  trembles  ; 
and  a  vague  god  within  him,  half  allegory,  half  reality, 
cries  out  to  him  that  a  new  life  for  him  has  begun 
Beatrice  has  become  the  ideal  ;  Beatrice,  the  real 
woman,  has  ceased  to  exist ;  the  Beatrice  of  his  imagi- 
nation only  remains,  a  piece  of  his  own  soul  embodied 
in  a  gracious  and  beautiful  reality,  which  he  follows, 
seeks,  but  never  tries  to  approach.  Of  the  real  woman 
he  asks  nothing  ;  no  word  throughout  the  "  Vita 
Nuova  "  of  entreaty  or  complaint,  no  shadow  of  desire, 
not  a  syllable  of  those  reproaches  of  cruelty  which 
Petrarch  is  for  ever  showering  upon  Laura.  He 
desires  nothing  of  Beatrice,  and  Beatrice  cannot  act 


412  EUPHORION. 

.vrongly  ;  she  is  perfection,  and  perfection  makes  him 
who  contemplates  humble  at  once  and  proud,  glorifying 
his  spirit.  Once,  indeed,  he  would  wish  that  she  might 
listen  to  him  ;  he  has  reason  to  think  that  he  has  fallen 
in  her  esteem,  has  seemed  base  and  uncourteous  in 
her  eyes,  and  he  would  explain.  But  he  does  not  wish 
to  address  her ;  it  never  occurs  to  him  that  she  can 
ever  feel  in  any  way  towards  him  ;  it  is  enough  that 
he  feels  towards  her.  Let  her  go  by  and  smile  and 
graciously  salute  her  friends  :  the  sight  of  her  grave 
and  pure  regalness,  nay,  rather  divinity,  of  womanhood, 
suffices  for  his  joy  ;  nay,  later  the  consciousness  comes 
upon  him  that  it  is  sufficient  to  know  of  her  existence 
and  of  his  love  even  without  seeing  her.  And,  as 
must  be  the  case  in  such  ideal  passion,  where  the 
action  is  wholly  in  the  mind  of  the  lover,  he  is  at  first 
ashamed,  afraid ;  he  feels  a  terror  lest  his  love,  if 
known  to  her,  should  excite  her  scorn  ;  a  horror  lest  it 
be  misunderstood  and  befouled  by  the  jests  of  those 
around  him,  even  of  those  same  gentle  women  to 
whom  he  afterwards  addresses  his  praise  of  Beatrice. 
He  is  afraid  of  exposing  to  the  air  of  reality  this  ideal 
flower  of  passion.  But  the  moment  comes  when  he 
can  hide  it  no  longer  ;  and,  behold,  the  passion  flower 
of  his  soul  opens  out  more  gloriously  in  the  sunlight 
of  the  world.  He  is  proud  of  his  passion,  of  his 
worship  ;  he  feels  the  dignity  and  glory  of  being  the 
priest  of  such  a  love.  The  women  all  round,  the 
beautiful,  courteous  women,  of  whom,  only  just  now, 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  413 

he  was  so  dreadfully  afraid,  become  his  friends  and 
confidants  ;  they  are  quite  astonished  (half  in  love, 
perhaps,  with  the  young  poet)  at  this  strange  way  of 
lovang  ;  they  sympathize,  admire,  are  in  love  with  his 
love  for  Beatrice.  And  to  them  he  speaks  of  her 
rather  than  to  men,  for  the  womanhood  which  they 
share  with  his  lady  consecrates  them  in  his  eyes  ; 
and  they,  without  jealousy  towards  this  ideal  woman, 
though  perhaps  not  without  longing  for  this  ideal  love, 
listen  as  they  might  listen  to  some  new  and  unac- 
countably sweet  music,  touched  and  honoured,  and 
feeling  towards  Dante  as  towards  some  beautiful,  half- 
mad  thing.  He  talks  of  her,  sings  of  her,  and  is 
happy ;  the  strangest  thing  in  this  intensely  real 
narrative  of  real  love  is  this  complete  satisfaction  of 
the  passion  in  its  own  existence,  this  complete  absence 
of  all  desire  or  hope.  But  this  happiness  is  interrupted 
by  the  sudden,  terrible  thought  that  one  day  all  this 
must  cease  ;  the  horrible,  logical  necessity  coming 
straight  home  to  him,  that  one  day  she  must  die — 
"  Di  necessita  conviene  che  la  gentilissima  Beatrice 
alcuna  volta  si  muoia."  There  is  nothing  truer,  more 
intensely  pathetic,  in  all  literature,  than  this  frightful 
pang  of  evil,  not  real,  but  first  imagined  ;  this  frightful 
nightmare  vision  of  the  end  coming  when  reality  is 
still  happy.  Have  we  not  all  of  us  at  one  time  felt 
the  horrible  shudder  of  that  sudden  perception  that 
happiness  must  end  ;  that  the  beloved,  the  living,  must 
die  ;  that  this  thing  the  present,  which  we  clasp  tight 


414  EUPHORION. 

with  our  arms,  which  throbs  against  our  breast,  will  in 
but  few  moments  be  gone,  vanished,  leaving  us  to 
grasp  mere  phantom  recollections  ?  Compared  with 
this  the  blow  of  the  actual  death  of  Beatrice  is  gentle. 
And  then,  the  truthfulness  of  his  narration  how,  with 
yearning,  empty  heart,  hungering  after  those  poor  lost 
realities  of  happiness,  after  that  occasional  glimpse  of 
his  lady,  that  rare  catching  of  her  voice,  that  blessed 
consciousness  of  her  existence,  he  little  by  little  lets 
himself  be  consoled,  cradled  to  sleep  like  a  child  which 
has  sobbed  itself  out,  in  the  sympathy,  the  vague  love, 
of  another — the  Donna  della  Finestra — with  whom  he 
speaks  of  Beatrice  ;  and  the  sudden,  terrified,  starting 
up  and  shaking  off  of  any  such  base  consolation, 
the  wrath  at  any  such  mental  infidelity  to  the  dead 
one,  the  indignant  impatience  with  his  own  weak- 
ness, with  his  baseness  in  not  understanding  that 
it  is  enough  that  Beatrice  has  lived  and  that  he  has 
loved  her,  in  not  feeling  that  the  glory  and  joy  of  the 
ineffaceable  past  is  sufficient  for  all  present  and  future. 
A  revolution  in  himself  which  gradually  merges  in 
that  grave  final  resolve,  that  sudden  seeing  how 
Beatrice  can  be  glorified  by  him,  that  solemn,  quiet, 
brief  determination  not  to  say  any  more  of  her  as  yet  ; 
not  till  he  can  show  her  transfigured  in  Paradise. 
"  After  this  sonnet  there  appeared  unto  me  a  marvel- 
lous vision,  in  which  I  beheld  things  that  made  me 
propose  unto  myself  to  speak  no  more  of  this  blessed 
one,  until  the  time  when  I  might  more  worthily  treat 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  415 

of  her.  And  that  this  may  come  to  pass,  I  strive  with 
all  my  endeavour,  even  as  she  truly  knows  it.  Thus, 
if  it  should  please  Him,  through  whom  all  things  do 
live,  that  my  life  continue  for  several  more  years,  I 
hope  to  say  of  her  such  things  as  have  never  been  said 
of  any  lady.  And  then  may  it  please  Him,  who  is  the 
lord  of  all  courtesy,  that  my  soul  shall  go  forth  to  see 
the  glory  of  its  lady,  that  is  to  say,  of  that  blessed 
Beatrice,  who  gloriously  looks  up  into  the  face  of  Him, 
qui  est  per  omnia  scEciila  benedictus." 

Thus  ends  the  "  Vita  Nuova  ;  "  a  book,  to  find  any 
equivalent  for  whose  reality  and  completeness  of 
passion,  though  it  is  passion  for  a  woman  whom  the 
poet  scarcely  knows  and  of  whom  he  desires  nothing, 
we  must  go  back  to  the  merest  fleshly  love  of  Antiquity, 
of  Sappho  or  Catullus  ;  for  modern  times  are  too  hesi- 
tating and  weak.  So  at  least  it  seems  ;  but  in  fact, 
if  we  only  think  over  the  matter,  we  shall  find  that  in 
no  earthly  love  can  we  find  this  reality  and  complete- 
ness :  it  is  possible  only  in  love  like  Dante's.  For 
there  can  be  no  unreality  in  it :  it  is  a  reality  of  the 
imagination,  and  leaves,  with  all  its  mysticism  and  . 
idealism,  no  room  for  falsehood.  Any  other  kind  of 
love  may  be  set  aside,  silenced,  by  the  activity  of  the 
mind ;  this  love  of  Dante's  constitutes  that  very  activity. 
And,  after  reading  that  last  page  which  I  have  above 
transcribed,  as  those  closing  Latin  words  echo  through 
our  mind  like  the  benediction  from  an  altar,  we  feel 
as   if  we  were  rising  from  our  knees  in  some  secret 


416  EUPHORION. 

chapel,  bright  with  tapers  and  dim  with  incense ;  among' 
a  crowd  kneeling  like  ourselves  ;  yet  solitary,  conscious 
of  only  the  glory  we  have  seen  and  tasted,  of  that  love 
qui  est  per  omnia  S(2cida  benedictiis. 


III. 

But  is  it  right  that  we  should  feel  thus  ?  Is  it  right  that 
love,  containing  within  itself  the  potentialities  of  so 
many  things  so  sadly  needed  in  this  cold  real  world, 
as  patience,  tenderness,  devotion,  and  loving-kindness 
— is  it  right  that  love  should  thus  be  carried  away  out 
of  ordinary  life  and  enclosed,  a  sacred  thing  for  con- 
templation, in  the  shrine  or  chapel  of  an  imaginary 
Beatrice  ?  And,  on  the  other  hand,  is  it  right  that 
into  the  holy  places  of  our  soul,  the  places  where  we 
should  come  face  to  face  with  the  unattainable  ideal 
of  our  own  conduct  that  we  may  strive  after  something 
nobler  than  mere  present  pleasure  and  profit — is  it 
right  that  into  such  holy  places,  destined  but  for  an 
abstract  perfection,  there  should  be  placed  a  mere 
half-unknown,  vaguely  seen  woman  ?  In  short,  is  not 
this  "Vita  Nuova"  a  mere  false  ideal,  one  of  those  works 
of  art  which,  because  they  are  beautiful,  get  worshipped 
as  holy  ? 

This  question  is  a  grave  one,  and  worthy  to  make 
us  pause.  The  world  is  full  of  instances  of  the  fatal 
waste  of  feelings  misapplied :  of  human  affections, 
human  sympathy  and  compassion,  so  terribly  neces- 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  417 

sary  to  man,  wasted  in  various  religious  systems, 
upon  Christ  and  God :  of  religious  aspirations,  con- 
templation, worship,  and  absorption,  necessary  to  the 
improvement  of  the  soul,  wasted  in  various  artistic  or 
poetic  crazes  upon  mere  pleasant  works,  or  pleasant 
fancies,  of  man  ;  wastefulness  of  emotions,  wasteful- 
ness of  time,  which  constitute  two-thirds  of  mankind's 
history  and  explain  the  vast  amount  of  evil  in  past 
and  present.  The  present  question  therefore  becomes* 
is  not  this  "  Vita  Nuova  "  merely  another  instance  of 
this  lamentable  carr\ang  off  of  precious  feelings  in 
channels  where  they  result  no  longer  in  fertilization, 
but  in  corruption  ?  The  Middle  Ages,  especially,  in 
its  religion,  its  philosophy,  nay,  in  that  very  love  of 
which  I  am  writing,  are  one  succession  of  such  acts 
of  wastefulness.  This  question  has  come  to  me  many 
a  time,  and  has  left  me  in  much  doubt  and  trouble 
But  on  reflection  I  am  prepared  to  answer  that  such 
doubts  as  these  may  safely  be  cast  behind  us,  and  that 
we  may  trust  that  instinct  which,  whenever  we  lay 
down  the  "  Vita  Nuova,"  tells  us  that  to  have  felt  and 
loved  this  book  is  one  of  those  spiritual  gains  in  our 
life  which,  come  what  may,  can  never  be  lost  entirely. 
The  "Vita  Nuova"  represents  the  most  exceptional 
of  exceptional  moral  and  intellectual  conditions. 
Dante's  love  for  Beatrice  is,  in  great  measure,  to  be 
regarded  as  an  extraordinary  and  exquisite  work  of 
art,  produced   not  by  the  volition  of  man,  but  by  the 

accidental  combination   of  circumstances.      It   is  no 

28 


41 8  EUPHORION. 

more  suited  to  ordinary  life  than  would  a  golden  and 
ivory  goddess  of  Phidias  be  suited  to  be  the  wife  of  a 
mortal  man.  But  it  may  not  therefore  be  useless  ; 
nay,  it  may  be  of  the  highest  utility.  It  may  serve 
that  high  utilitarian  mission  of  all  art,  to  correct 
the  real  by  the  ideal,  to  mould  the  thing  as  it  is  in 
the  semblance  of  the  thing  as  it  should  be.  Herein, 
let  it  be  remembered,  consists  the  value,  the  necessity 
of  the  abstract  and  the  ideal.  In  the  long  history 
of  evolution  we  have  now  reached  the  stage  where 
selection  is  no  longer  in  the  mere  hands  of  uncon- 
scious nature,  but  of  conscious  or  half-conscious 
man  ;  who  makes  himself,  or  is  made  by  mankind, 
according  to  not  merely  physical  necessities,  but  to 
the  intellectual  necessity  of  realizing  the  ideal,  of 
pursuing  the  object,  of  imitating  the  model,  before 
him.  No  man  will  ever  find  the  living  counterpart  of 
that  chryselephantine  goddess  of  the  Greeks;  ivory  and 
gold,  nay,  marble,  fashioned  by  an  artist,  are  one  thing; 
■flesh  is  another,  and  flesh  fashioned  by  mere  blind 
accident.  But  the  man  who  should  have  beheld  that 
Phidian  goddess,  who  should  have  felt  her  full  perfec- 
tion, would  not  have  been  as  easily  satisfied  as  any 
other  with  a  mere  commonplace  living  woman  ;  he 
would  have  sought — and  seeking,  w^ould  have  had  more 
likelihood  of  finding — the  woman  of  flesh  and  blood 
who  nearest  approached  to  that  ivory  and  gold  per- 
fection. The  case  is  similar  with  the  "  Vita  Nuova." 
I^o   earthly    affection,  no   natural  love    of   man    for 


iMEDL^VAL  LOVE.  419 

woman,  of  an  entire  human  being,  body  and  soul,  for 
another  entire  human  being,  can  ever  be  the  counter- 
part of  this  passion  for  Beatrice,  the  passion  of  a  mere 
mind  for  a  mere  mental  ideal.  But  if  the  old  lust- 
fattened  evil  of  the  world  is  to  diminish  rather  than 
to  increase,  why  then  every  love  of  man  for  vv^oman 
and  of  woman  for  man  should  tend,  to  the  utmost 
possibility,  to  resemble  that  love  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova." 
For  mankind  has  gradually  separated  from  brute  kind 
merely  by  the  development  of  those  possibilities  of  in- 
tellectual and  moral  passion  which  the  animal  has  not 
got;  an  animal  man  will  never  cease  to  be,  but  a  man 
he  can  daily  more  and  more  become,  until  from  the 
obscene  goat-legged  and  goat-faced  creature  which  we 
commonly  see,he  has  turned  into  something  like  certain 
antique  fauns:  a  beautiful  creature,  not  noticeably  a 
beast,  a  beast  in  only  the  smallest  portion  of  his  nature. 
In  order  that  this  may  come  to  pass — and  its  coming 
to  pass  means,  let  us  remember,  the  enormous  increase 
of  happiness  and  diminution  of  misery  upon  earth — 
it  is  necessary  that  day  by  day  and  year  by  year  there 
should  enter  into  man's  feelings,  emotions,  and  habits, 
into  his  whole  life,  a  greater  proportion  of  that  which 
is  his  own,  and  is  not  shared  by  the  animal  ;  that  his 
actions,  preferences,  the  great  bulk  of  his  conscious 
existence,  should  be  busied  with  things  of  the  soul, 
truth,  good,  and  beauty,  and  not  with  things  of  the 
body.  Hence  the  love  of  such  a  gradually  improving 
and    humanizing    man    for    a    gradually   improving 


420  EUPHORION. 

and  humanizing  woman,  should  become,  as  much  as 
is  possible,  a  connection  of  the  higher  and  more 
human,  rather  than  of  the  lower  and  more  bestial^ 
portions  of  their  nature  ;  it  should  tend,  in  its  reci- 
procal stimulation,  to  make  the  man  more  a  man,  the 
woman  more  a  woman,  to  make  both  less  of  the  mere 
male  and  female  animals  that  they  were.  In  brief,  love 
should  increase,  instead,  like  that  which  oftenest  pro- 
fanes love's  name,  of  diminishing,  the  power  of  aspir- 
ation, of  self-direction,  of  self-restraint,  which  may 
exist  within  us.  Now  to  tend  to  this  is  to  tend  towards 
the  love  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova  ;  "  to  tend  towards  the 
love  of  the  "Vita  Nuova"  is  to  tend  towards  this. 
Say  what  you  will  of  the  irresistible  force  of  original 
constitution,  it  remains  certain,  and  all  history  is 
there  as  witness,  that  mankind — that  is  to  say,  the 
only  mankind  in  whom  lies  the  initiative  of  good, 
mankind  which  can  judge  and  select — possesses  the 
faculty  of  feeling  and  acting  in  accordance  with  its 
standard  of  feeling  and  action  ;  the  faculty  in  great 
measure  of  becoming  that  which  it  thinks  desirable 
to  become.  Now  to  have  perceived  the  even  imaginary 
existence  of  such  a  passion  as  that  of  Dante  for  Bea- 
trice, must  be,  for  all  who  can  perceive  it,  the  first  step 
towards  attempting  to  bring  into  reality  a  something 
of  that  passion  :  the  real  passion  conceived  while 
the  remembrance  of  that  ideal  passion  be  still  in  the 
mind  will  bear  to  it  a  certain  resemblance,  even  as, 
according  to  the  ancients,  the  children  born  of  mothers 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  i,ii 

whose  rooms  contained  some  image  of  Apollo  or 
Adonis  would  have  in  them  a  reflex,  however  faint, 
of  that  beauty  in  whose  presence  they  came  into 
existence.  In  short,  it  seems  to  me, that  as  the  "Vita 
Nuova "  embodies  the  utmost  ideal  of  absolutely 
spiritual  love,  and  as  to  spiritualize  love  must  long 
remain  one  of  the  chief  moral  necessities  of  the  world, 
there  exists  in  this  book  a  moral  force,  a  moral  value, 
a  power  in  its  unearthly  passion  and  purity,  which,  as 
much  as  anything  more  deliberately  unselfish,  more 
self-consciously  ethical,  we  must  acknowledge  and 
honour  as  holy. 

As  the  love  of  him  who  has  read  and  felt  the  "  Vita 
Nuova  "  cannot  but  strive  towards  a  purer  nature,  so 
also  the  love  of  which  poets  sang  became  also  nobler 
as  the  influence  of  the  strange  Tuscan  school  of 
platonic  lyrists  spread  throughout  literature^  bringing 
to  men  the  knowledge  of  a  kind  of  love  born  of  that 
idealizing  and  worshipping  passion  of  the  Middle 
Ages  ;  but  of  mediaeval  love  chastened  by  the  manners 
of  stern  democracy  and  passed  through  the  sieve  of 
Christian  mysticism  and  pagan  philosophy.  Of  this  in- . 
luenceof  the  "Vita  Nuova" — for  the"  Vita  Nuova"  had 
concentrated  in  itself  all  the  intensest  characteristics 
of  Dante's  immediate  predecessors  and  contemporaries, 
causing  them  to  become  useless  and  forgotten  —  of 
this  influence  of  the  "Vita  Nuova,"  there  is  perhaps  no 
more  striking  example  than  that  of  the  poet  who, 
constituted  by  nature  to  be  the  mere  continuator  of 


422  EUPHORION. 

the  romantically  gallant  tradition  of  the  troubadours, 
became,  and  hence  his  importance  and  glory,  the 
mediator  between  Dante  and  the  centuries  which 
followed  him  ;  the  man  who  gave  to  mankind,  inca- 
pable as  yet  of  appreciating  or  enduring  the  spiritual 
essence  of  the  "Vita  Nuova,"  that  self-same  essence  of 
intellectual  love  in  an  immortal  dilution.  I  speak,  of 
course,  of  Petrarch.  His  passion  is  neither  ideal  nor 
strong.  The  man  is  in  love,  or  has  been  in  love,  exist- 
ing on  a  borderland  of  loving  and  not  loving,  with  the 
beautiful  woman.  His  elegant,  refined,  half-knightly, 
half-scholarly,  and  altogether  courtly  mind  is  delighted 
with  her  ;  with  her  curly  yellow  hair,  her  good  red 
and  white  beauty  (we  are  never  even  told  that  Dante's 
Beatrice  is  beautiful,  yet  how  much  lovelier  is  she  not 
than  this  Laura,  descended  from  all  the  golden-haired 
bright-eyed  ladies  of  the  troubadours !;,  with  her 
manner,  her  amiability,  her  purity  and  dignity  in  this 
ecclesiastical  Babylon  called  Avignon.  He  maintains 
a  semi-artificial  love  ;  frequenting  her  house,  writing 
sonnet  after  sonnet,  rhetorical  exercises,  studies  from 
the  antique  and  the  Provencal,  for  the  most  part  ;  he, 
who  was  born  to  be  a  mere  troubadour  like  Ventadour 
or  Folquet,  becomes,  through  the  influence  of  Dante, 
the  type  of  the  poet  Abate,  of  the  poetic  cavaliere 
serveiite ;  a  good,  weak  man  with  aspirations,  who, 
failing  to  get  the  better  of  Laura's  virtue,  doubtless 
consoles  himself  elsewhere,  but  returns  to  an  habitual 
contemplation  of  it.     He  is,  being  constitutionally  a 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  4-j. 

troubadour,  an  Italian  priest  turned  partly  Proven9al, 
vexed  at  her  not  becoming  his  mistress  ;  then  (having 
made  up  his  mind,  which  was  but  little  set  upon  her),, 
quite  pleased  at  her  refusal :  it  turns  her  into  a  kind 
of  Beatrice,  and  him,  poor  man,  heaven  help  him  !  into 
a  kind  of  Dante — a  Dante  for  the  use  of  the  world  at 
large.  He  goes  on  visiting  Laura,  and  writing  to  her 
a  sonnet  regularly  so  many  times  a  week,  and  the 
best,  carefully  selected,  we  feel  distinctly  persuaded,  at 
regular  intervals.  It  is  a  determined  cultus,  a  sort  of 
half-real  affectation,  something  equivalent  to  lighting 
a  lamp  before  a  very  well-painted  and  very  conspicu- 
ous shrine.  All  his  humanities,  all  his  Provengal  lore 
go  into  these  poems — written  for  whom  .''  For  her  I 
Decidedly  ;  for  she  has  no  reason  not  to  read  the 
effusions  of  this  amiable,  weak  priestlet ;  she  feels 
nothing  for  him.  For  her ;  but  doubtless  also  to  be 
handed  round  in  society  ;  a  new  sonnet  or  canzone 
by  that  charming  and  learned  man,  the  Abate 
Petrarch.  There  is  considerable  emptiness  in  all  this  1 
he  praises  Laura's  chastity,  then  grows  impatient,  then 
praises  her  again  ;  adores  her,  calls  her  cruel,  his 
goddess,  his  joy,  his  torment ;  he  does  not  really  want 
her,  but  in  the  vacuity  of  his  feeling,  thinks  he  does ; 
calls  her  alternately  the  flat,  abusive,  and  eulogistic 
names  which  mean  nothing.  He  plays  loud  and  soft 
with  this  absence  of  desire  ;  he  fiddle  faddles  in 
descriptions  of  her,  not  passionate  or  burning,  but 
delicately  undressed  :    he   sees  her  (but  with  chaste 


424  EUPHORION. 

eyes)  in  her  bath ;  he  envies  her  veil,  &c.  ;  he  neither 
violently  intellectually  embraces,  nor  humbly  bows 
down  in  imagination  before  her  ;  he  trifles  gracefully, 
modestly,  half-familiarly,  with  her  finger  tips,  with  the 
locks  of  her  hair,  and  so  forth.  Fancy  Dante  abusing 
Beatrice  ;  fancy  Dante  talking  of  Beatrice  in  her 
bath  ;  the  mere  idea  of  his  indignation  and  shame 
makes  one  shameful  and  indignant  at  the  thought. 
But  this  perfect  Laura  is  no  Beatrice,  or  only  a  half- 
and-half  sham  one.  She  is  no  ideal  figure,  merely  a 
figure  idealized  ;  this  is  no  imaginative  passion,  merely 
an  unreal  one.  Compare,  for  instance,  the  suggestion 
of  Laura's  possible  death  with  the  suggestion  of  the 
possible  death  of  Beatrice.  Petrarch  does  not  love 
sufficiently  to  guess  what  such  a  loss  would  be.  Then 
Laura  does  die.  Here  Petrarch  rises.  The  severing 
of  the  dear  old  habits,  the  absence  of  the  sweet  reality, 
the  terrible  sense  that  all  is  over,  Death,  the  great 
poetizer  and  giver  of  love  philters,  all  this  makes  him 
love  Laura  as  he  never  loved  her  before.  The  poor 
weak  creature,  who  cannot,  like  a  troubadour,  go  seek 
a  new  mistress  when  the  old  one  fails  him,  feels 
dreadfully  alone,  the  world  dreadfully  dreary  around 
him  ;  he  sits  down  and  cries,  and  his  crying  is 
genuine,  making  the  tears  come  also  into  our  eyes. 
And  Laura,  as  she  becomes  a  more  distant  ideal, 
becomes  nobler,  though  noble  with  only  a  faint  earthly 
graciousness  not  comparable  to  the  glory  of  the  living 
Beatrice.     And,  as   he    goes   on,  growing  older  and 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  425 

weaker  and  more  desolate,  the  thought  of  a  glorified 
Laura  (as  all  are  glorified,  even  in  the  eyes  of  the 
weakest,  by  death)  begins  to  haunt  him  as  Dante 
was  haunted  by  the  thought  of  Beatrice  alive.  Yet, 
even  at  this  very  time,  come  doubts  of  the  lawfulness 
of  having  thus  adored  (or  thought  he  had  adored)  a 
mortal  woman  ;  he  does  not  know  whether  all  this 
may  not  have  been  vanity  and  folly  ;  he  tries  to  turn 
his  thoughts  away  from  Laura  and  up  to  God,  Per- 
haps he  may  be  called  on  to  account  for  having 
given  too  much  of  his  life  to  a  mere  earthly  love 
Then,  again,  Laura  reappears  beautified  in  his 
memory,  and  is  again  tremblingly  half-conjured  away. 
He  is  weak,  and  sad,  and  helpless,  and  alone  ;  and  his 
heart  is  empty  ;  he  knows  not  what  to  think  nor  how 
to  feel  ;  he  sobs,  and  we  cry  with  him.  Nowhere 
could  there  be  found  a  stranger  contrast  than  this 
nostalgic  craving  after  the  dead  Laura,  vacillating  and 
troubled  by  fear  of  sin  and  doubt  of  unworthiness  of 
object,  with  that  solemn  ending  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova," 
where  the  name  of  Beatrice  is  pronounced  for  the  last 
time  before  it  be  glorified  in  Paradise,  where  Dante 
devotes  his  life  to  becoming  worthy  of  saying  "  such 
words  as  have  never  been  said  of  any  lady."  The 
ideal  woman  is  one  and  unchangeable  in  glory,  and 
unchangeable  is  the  passion  of  her  lover  ;  but  of  this 
sweet  dead  Laura,  whose  purity  and  beauty  and . 
cruelty  he  had  sung,  without  a  tremor  of  self-un- 
worthiness  all  her  life,  of  her  the  poor  weak  Petrarch 


426  EUPHORION. 

begins  to  doubt,  of  her  and  her  worthiness  of  all  this 
love ;  and  when  ?  when  she  is  dead  and  himself  is 
dying. 

Such  a  man  is  Petrarch ;  and  yet,  by  the  irresistible 
purifying  and  elevating  power  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova," 
this  man  came  to  write  not  other  albas  and  Serenas^ 
not  other  love-songs  to  be  added  to  the  love-songs  of 
Provence,  but  those  sonnets  and  canzoni  which  for 
four  centuries  taught  the  world,  too  coarse  as  yet  to 
receive  Dante's  passion  at  first  hand,  a  nobler  and  more 
spiritual  love.  After  Petrarch  a  gradual  change  takes 
place  in  the  poetic  conception  of  love  :  except  in 
learned  revivalisms  or  in  loose  buffooneries,  the  mere 
fleshly  love  of  Antiquity  disappears  out  of  literature;. 
and  equally  so,  though  by  a  slower  process  of  gradual 
transformation,  vanishes  also  the  adoring,  but  undis- 
guisedly  adulterous  love  of  the  troubadours  and  min- 
nesingers. Into  the  love  instincts  of  mankind  have 
been  mingled,  however  much  diluted,  some  drops  of 
the  more  spiritual  passion  of  Dante.  The  piiella  of 
Antiquity,  the  noble  dame  of  feudal  days,  is  succeeded 
in  Latin  countries,  in  Italy,  and  France,  and  Spain 
and  Portugal,  by  the  gloriosa  donna  imitated  from 
Petrarch,  and  imitated  by  Petrarch  from  Dante  ;  a  long 
line  of  shadowy  figures,  veiled  in  the  veil  of  Madonna 
Laura,  ladies  beloved  of  Lorenzo  and  Michael  Angelo,. 
of  Ariosto,  and  Tasso,  and  Camoens,  and  Cervantes,, 
passes  through  the  world  ;  nay,  even  the  sprightly 
mistress  of  Ronsard,  half-bred  pagan  and  troubadour^. 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  427 

has  airs  of  dignity  and  mystery  which  make  us  ahnost 
think  that  in  this  dainty  coquettish  French  body,  of 
Marie  or  Helene  or  Cassandrette,  there  really  may  be 
an  immortal  soul.  But  with  the  Renaissance — that 
movement  half  of  mediaeval  democratic  progress,  and 
half  of  antique  revivalism,  and  to  which  in  reality 
belongs  not  merely  Petrarch,  but  Dante,  and  every 
one  of  the  Tuscan  poets,  Guinicelli,  Lapo  Gianni, 
Cavalcanti,  who  broke  with  the  feudal  poetry  of 
Provence  and  Sicily — with  the  Renaissance,  or  rather 
with  its  long-drawn-out  end,  comes  the  close,  for  the 
moment,  of  the  really  creative  activity  of  the  Latin 
peoples  in  the  domain  of  poetry.  All  the  things  for 
two  centuries  which  Italy  and  France  and  Spain  and 
Portugal  (which  we  must  remember  for  the  sake  of 
Camoens)  continue  to  produce,  are  but  developments 
of  parts  left  untouched;  or  refinements  of  extreme 
detail,  as  in  the  case,  particularly,  of  the  French  poets 
of  the  sixteenth  century ;  but  poetry  receives  from  these 
races  nothing  new  or  vital,  no  fresh  ideal  or  fruitful 
marriage  of  ideals.  And  here  begins,  uniting  in  itself 
all  the  scattered  and  long-dormant  powers  of  Northern 
poetry,  the  great  and  unexpected  action  of  England. 
It  had  slept  through  the  singing  period  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  was  awakened,  not  by  Germany  or  Provence, 
but  by  Italy :  Boccaccio  and  Petrarch  spoke,  and,  as 
through  dreams,  England  in  Chaucer's  voice,  made 
answer.  Again,  when  the  Renaissance  had  drawn  to  a 
close,  far  on  in  the  sixteenth  century,  English  poetry  was 


428  E  UP  HO  RIO  N. 

reawakened  ;  and  again  by  Italy.  This  time  it  was 
completely  wakened,  and  arose  and  slept  no  more. 
And  one  of  the  great  and  fruitful  things  achieved  by 
English  poetry  in  this  its  final  awakening  was  to  give 
to  the  world  the  new,  the  modern,  perhaps  the  defini- 
tive, the  final  ideal  of  love.  England  drank  a  deep 
draught — how  deep  we  see  from  Sidney's  and  Spenser's 
sonnets — of  Petrarch  ;  and  in  this  pleasant  dilution, 
tasted  and  felttheburning  essence  of  the  "VitaNuova;" 
for  though  Dante  remained  as  the  poet,  the  poet  of 
heaven  and  hell,  this  happy  half-and-half  Petrarch  had 
for  full  two  centuries  completely  driven  into  oblivion 
the  young  Dante  who  had  loved  Beatrice.  For 
England,  for  this  magnificent  and  marvellous  out- 
burst of  all  the  manifold  poetic  energy  stored  up  and 
quintupled  during  that  long  period  of  inertness,  there 
could  however  be  no  foreign  imported  ideal  of  love; 
there  was  no  possibility  of  a  new  series  of  spectral 
Lauras,  shadows  projected  by  a  shadow.  Already, 
long  ago,  at  the  first  call  of  Petrarch,  Chaucer,  by  the 
side  of  the  merely  mediaeval  love  types — of  brutish 
lust  and  doglike  devotion — of  the  Wife  of  Bath  and  of 
Griseldis,  had  rough-sketched  a  kind  of  modern  love, 
the  love  which  is  to  become  that  of  Romeo  and 
Hamlet,  in  his  story  of  Palemon  and  Arcite.  Among 
the  poetic  material  which  existed  in  England  at  the 
close  of  the  sixteenth  century  was  the  old,  long- 
neglected,  domestic  love,  quiet,  undemonstrative,  es- 
sentially unsinging,  of  the  early  Northern  (as  indeed 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  429 

also  of  the  Greek  and  Hindoo)  epics  ;  a  domestic  love 
which,  in  a  social  condition  more  closely  resembling 
our  own  than  any  other,  even  than  that  of  the  Italian 
democracies,  which  had  preceded  it,  among  a  people 
who  permitted  a  woman  to  choose  her  own  husband, 
and  forbade  a  man  wooing  another  man's  wife,  had 
already,  in  ballads  and  folk  poetry,  begun  a  faint 
twitter  of  song.  To  this  love  of  the  man  and  the  woman 
who  hope  to  marry,  strong  and  tender,  but  still  (as 
Coleridge  remarked  of  several  of  the  lesser  Elizabethan 
playwrights)  most  outspokenly  carnal,  was  united  by 
the  pure  spirit  of  Spenser,  by  the  unerring  genius  of 
Shakespeare,  that  vivifying  drop  of  burning,  spiritual 
love  taken  from  out  of  the  "  Vita  Nuova,"  which  had 
floated,  like  some  sovereign  essential  oil,  on  the  top 
of  Petrarch's  rose-water.  Henceforward  the  world 
possesses  a  new  kind  of  love  :  the  love  of  Romeo,  of 
Hamlet,  of  Bassanio,  of  Viola,  and  of  Juliet;  the  love 
of  the  love  poems  of  Shelley,  of  Tennyson,  of  Brown- 
ing and  Browning's  wife.  A  love  whose  blindness, 
exaggeration  of  passion,  all  that  might  have  made  it 
foolish  and  impracticable,  leads  no  longer  to  folly  and 
sin,  but  to  an  intenser  activity  of  mankind's  imagination 
of  the  good  and  beautiful,  to  a  momentary  realization 
in  our  fancy  of  all  our  vague  dreams  of  perfection  ;  a 
love  which,  though  it  may  cool  down  imperceptibly 
and  pale  in  its  intenseness,  like  the  sunrise  fires  into 
a  serene  sky,  has  left  some  glory  round  the  head  of 
the  wife,  some  glory  in  the  heart  of  the  husband,  has 


430  EUPHORION. 

been,  however  fleeting,  a  vision  of  beauty  which  has 
made  beauty  more  real.  And  all  this  owing  to  the  cre- 
ation, the  storing  up,  the  purification  by  the  Platonic 
poets  of  Tuscany,  of  that  strange  and  seemingly  so 
artificial  and  unreal  thing,  mediaeval  love  ;  the  very 
forms  and  themes  of  whose  poetry,  the  sercna  and 
the  alba,  which  had  been  indignantly  put  aside  by  the 
early  Italian  lyrists,  being  unconsciously  revived,  and 
purified  and  consecrated  in  the  two  loveliest  love  poems 
of  Elizabethan  poetry :  the  sereiia,  the  evening  song 
of  impatient  expectation,  in  Spenser's  Epithalamium  ; 
the  alba,  the  dawn  song  of  hurried  parting,  in  the 
balcony  scene  of  "  Romeo  and  Juliet." 

Let  us  recapitulate.  The  feudal  Middle  Ages  gave 
to  mankind  a  more  refined  and  spiritual  love,  a  love 
all  chivalry,  fidelity,  and  adoration,  but  a  love  steeped 
in  the  poison  of  adultery  ;  and  to  save  the  pure  and 
noble  portions  of  this  mediaeval  love  became  the 
mission  of  the  Tuscan  poets  of  that  strange  school  of 
Platonic  love  which  in  its  very  loveliness  may  some- 
times seem  so  unnatural  and  sterile.  For,  by  reducing 
this  mediaeval  love  to  a  mere  intellectual  passion, 
seeking  in  woman  merely  a  self-made  embodiment 
of  cravings  after  perfection,  they  cleansed  away  that 
deep  stain  of  adultery  ;  they  quadrupled  the  intensity 
of  the  ideal  element ;  they  distilled  the  very  essential 
spirit  of  poetic  passion,  of  which  but  a  few  drops, 
even  as  diluted  by  Petrarch,  precipitated,  when 
mingled  with  the  earthly  passion  of  future  poets,  to 


MEDIEVAL  LOVE.  431 

the  bottom,  no  longer  to  be  seen  or  tasted,  all  baser 
ingredients. 

And,  while  the  poems  of  minnesingers  and  trouba- 
dours have  ceased  to  appeal  to  us,  and  remain  merely 
for  their  charm  of  verse  and  of  graceful  conceit;  the 
poetry  written  by  the  Italii.ns  of  the  thirteenth  century 
for  women,  whose  love  was  but  an  imaginative  fervour, 
remains  concentrated  in  the  "Vita  Nuova;"  and  will 
remain  for  all  time  the  sovereign  purifier  to  which  the 
world  must  have  recourse  whenever  that  precipitate  of 
baser  instincts,  which  thickened  like  slime  the  love 
poetry  of  Antiquity,  shall  rise  once  more  and  sully 
the  purity  of  the  love  poetry  of  to-day. 


EPILOGUE. 


29 


EPILOGUE. 


More  than  a  year  has  elapsed  since  the  moment 
when,  fancying  that  this  series  of  studies  must  be 
well-nigh  complete,  I  attempted  to  explain  in  an 
introductory  chapter  what  the  nature  of  this  book  of 
mine  is,  or  would  fain  be.  I  had  hoped  that  each  of 
these  studies  would  complete  its  companions  ;  and 
that,  without  need  for  explicit  explanation,  my  whole 
idea  would  have  become  more  plain  to  others  than  it 
was  at  that  time  even  to  myself.  But  instead,  it  has 
become  obvious  that  the  more  carefully  I  had  sought 
to  reduce  each  question  to  unity,  the  more  that 
question  subdivided  and  connected  itself  with  other 
questions  ;  and  that,  with  the  solution  of  each  separate 
problem,  had  arisen  a  new  set  of  problems  which 
infinitely  complicated  the  main  lessons  to  be  deduced 
from  a  study  of  that  many-sided  civilization  to  which, 
remembering  the  brilliant  and  mysterious  offspring  of 
Faustus    and    Helena,    I    have    given    the   name   of 


436  EUPHORION. 

Euphorion.     Hence,  as  it  seems,  the  necessity  for  a 
few  further  words  of  explanation. 

In  those  introductory  pages  written  some  fifteen 
months  ago,  I  tried  to  bring  home  to  the  reader  a 
sense  which  has  haunted  me  throughout  the  writing 
of  this  volume  ;  namely,  that  instead  of  having  delibe- 
rately made  up  my  mind  to  study  the  Renaissance, 
as  one  makes  up  one's  mind  to  visit  Greece  or 
Egypt  or  the  Holy  Land  ;  I  have,  on  the  contrary, 
quite  accidentally  and  unconsciously,  found  myself 
wandering  about  in  spirit  among  the  monuments  of 
this  particular  historic  region,  even  as  I  might  wander 
about  in  the  streets  of  Siena  where  I  wrote  last  year, 
of  Florence  whence  I  write  at  present ;  wandering 
about  among  these  things,  and  little  by  little  feeling 
a  particular  interest  in  one,  then  in  another,  according 
as  each  happened  to  catch  my  fancy  or  to  recall  some 
already  known  thing.  Now  these,  which  for  want  of 
a  better  word  I  have  just  called  monuments,  and  just 
now,  less  clearly,  but  also  less  foolishly,  merely  tilings 
— these  things  were  in  reality  not  merely  individual 
and  really  existing  buildings,books,  pictures,  or  statues, 
individual  and  really  registered  men,  women,  and 
events  ;  they  were  the  mental  conceptions  which  I  had 
extracted  out  of  these  realities  ;  the  intellectual  types 
made  up  (as  the  mediaeval  symbols  of  justice  are 
made  up  of  the  visible  paraphernalia,  robe,  scales  and 
sword,  for  judging  and  weighing  and  punishing)  of 
the  impressions  left  on  the  mind  by  all  those  buildings 


EPILOGUE.  437 

or  books,  or  pictures,  or  statues,  or  men,  women,  and 
events.  They  were  not  the  iniquities  of  this  particular 
despot  nor  the  scandalous  sayings  of  that  particular 
humanist,  but  the  general  moral  chaos  of  the  Italian 
fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries  ;  not  the  poem  of 
Pulci,  of  Boiardo,  of  Ariosto  in  especial,  but  a  vast 
imaginary  poem  made  up  of  them  all  ;  not  the  medi- 
aeval saints  of  Angelico  and  the  pagan  demi-gods  of 
Michael  Angelo,  but  the  two  tremendous  abstractions  : 
the  spirit  of  Medijevalism  in  art,  and  the  spirit  ot 
Antiquity  ;  the  interest  in  the  distressed  soul,  and  the 
interest  in  the  flourishing  body.  And',  as  my  thoughts 
have  gone  back  to  Antiquity  and  onwards  to  our  own 
times,  their  starting-point  has  nevertheless  been  the 
Tuscan  art  of  the  fifteenth  century,  their  nucleus 
some  notes  on  busts  by  Benedetto  da  Maiano  and 
portraits  by  Raphael. 

My  dramatis  personcB  have  been  modes  of  feeling 
and  forms  of  art.  I  have  tried  to  explain  the  life  and 
character,  not  of  any  man  or  woman,  but  of  the  moral 
scepticism  of  Italy,  of  the  tragic  spirit  of  our  Eliza- 
bethan dramatists  ;  I  have  tried  to  write  the  biograph}- 
of  the  romance  poetry  of  the  Middle  Ages,  of  the 
realism  of  the  great  portrait  painters  and  sculptors  of 
the  Renaissance.  But  these,  my  dramatis  personcs, 
are,  let  me  repeat  it,  abstractions  :  they  exist  only  in 
my  mind  and  in  the  minds  of  those  who  think  like 
myself.  Hence,  like  all  abstractions,  they  represent 
the  essence  of  a  question,  but  not  its  completeness,  its 


438  EUPHORION. 

many-sidedness  as  we  may  see  it  in  reality.  Hence 
it  is  that  I  have  frequently  passed  over  exceptions  to 
the  rule  which  I  was  stating,  because  the  explanation 
of  these  exceptions  would  have  involved  the  formu- 
lating of  a  number  of  apparently  irrelevant  propo- 
sitions ;  so  that  any  one  who  please  may  accuse  me 
of  inexactness  ;  and,  to  give  an  instance,  cover  the 
margins  of  my  essay  on  Mediaeval  Love  with  a  whole 
list  of  virtuous  love  stories  of  the  Middle  Ages  ;  or 
else  ferret  out  of  Raynouard  and  Von  der  Hagen  a 
dozen  pages  of  mediaeval  poems  in  praise  of  rustic 
life.  These  objections  will  be  perfectly  correct,  and 
(so  far  as  my  knowledge  permitted  me)  I  might  have 
puzzled  the  reader  with  them  myself ;  but  it  remains 
none  the  less  certain  that,  in  the  main,  mediaeval  love 
was  not  virtuous,  and  mediaeval  peasantry  not  admired 
by  poets  ;  and  none  the  less  certain,  I  think,  also,  that 
in  describing  the  characteristics  and  origin  of  an 
abstract  thing,  such  as  mediaeval  love,  or  mediaeval 
feeling  towards  the  country  and  country  folk,  it  was 
my  business  to  state  the  rule  and  let  alone  the 
exceptions. 

There  is  another  matter  which  gives  me  far  greater 
concern.  In  creating  and  dealing  with  an  abstraction, 
one  is  frequently  forced,  if  I  may  use  the  expression, 
to  cut  a  subject  in  two,  to  bring  one  of  its  sides  into 
full  light  and  leave  the  other  in  darkness  ;  nay,  to 
speak  harshly  of  one  side  of  an  art  or  of  a  man  with- 
out being  able  to  speak  admiringly  of  another  side. 


EPILOGUE.  439 

This  one-sidedness,  this   apparent  injustice  of  judg- 
ment, has  in  some  cases  been  remedied  by  the  fact 
that  I  have  treated  in  one  study  those  things  which  I 
was  forced  to  omit  in  another  study  ;  as,  in  two  sepa- 
rate essays,  I  have  pointed  out  first  the  extreme  in- 
feriority of  Renaissance  sculpture  to  the  sculpture  of 
Antiquity  with  regard  to  absolute  beauty  of  form  ;  and 
then  the  immeasurable  superiorityof  Renaissance  over 
antique  sculpture  in  the  matter  of  that  beauty  and 
interest  dependent  upon  mere  arrangement  and  hand- 
ling, wherein  lies  the  beauty-creating  power  of  realistic 
schools.     But  most  often  I  have  shown  one  side,  not 
merely  of  an  artist  or  an  art,  but  of  my  own  feeling> 
without  showing  the  other ;  and  in  one  case  this  in- 
evitable one-sidedness  has  weighed  upon  me  almost 
like  personal  guilt,  and  has  almost  made  me  postpone 
the  publication  of  this  book  to  the  Greek  Kalends,  in 
hopes  of  being  able  to  explain  and  to  atone.     I  am 
alluding  to  Fra  Angelico.     I  spoke  of  him  in  a  study 
of  the   progress   of  mere   beautiful  form,  the   naked 
human  form  moreover,  in  the  art  of  the  Renaissance  ; 
I  looked  at  his  work  with  my  mind  full  of  the  un- 
approachable superiority  of  antique  form  ;    I  judged 
and  condemned  the  artist  with  reference  to  that  superb 
movement  towards  nature  and  form  and  bodily  beauty 
which  was  the  universal   movement  of  the  fifteenth 
century ;   I  lost  patience  with  this  saint  because  he 
would  not  turn  pagan  ;  I  pushed  aside,  because  he  did 
not  seek  for  a  classic  Olympus,  his  exquisite  dreams 


440  EUPHORION. 

of  a  medieval  Paradise.  I  had  taken  partj  as  its 
chronicler,  with  the  art  which  seeks  mere  plastic  per- 
fection, the  art  to  which  Angelico  said,  "  Retro  me 
Sathana."  It  was  my  intention  to  close  even  this 
volume  with  a  study  of  the  poetical  conception  of 
early  Renaissance  painting,  of  that  strange  kind  of 
painting  in  which  a  thing  but  imperfect  in  itself,  a 
mere  symbol  of  lovely  ideas,  brings  home  to  our  mind, 
with  a  rush  of  associations,  a  sense  of  beauty  and 
wonder  greater  perhaps  than  any  which  we  receive 
from  the  sober  reality  of  perfect  form.  Again,  there 
are  the  German  masters — the  great  engravers,  Kra- 
nach,  Altdorfer,  Aldegrever,  especially  ;  of  whom,  for 
their  absolute  pleasure  in  ugly  women,  for  their  filthy 
delight  in  horrors,  I  have  said  an  immense  amount  of 
ill  ;  and  of  whom,  for  their  wonderful  intuition  of 
dramatic  situation,  their  instinct  of  the  poetry  of 
common  things,  and  their  magnificently  imaginative 
rendering  of  landscape,  I  hope  some  day  to  say  an 
equal  amount  of  good. 

I  have  spoken  of  the  lesson  which  may  be  derived 
from  studies  even  as  humble  as  these  studies  of  mine  ; 
since,  in  my  opinion,  we  cannot  treat  history  as  a  mere 
art — though  history  alone  can  gives  us  now-a-days 
tragedy  which  has  ceased  to  exist  on  our  stage,  and 
wonder  which  has  ceased  to  exist  in  our  poetry — we 
cannot  seek  in  it  mere  selfish  enjoyment  of  imagina- 
tion and  emotion,  without  doing  our  soul  the  great 
injury  of  cheating  it  of  some  of  those  great  indigna- 


EPILOGUE.  441. 

tions,  some  of  those  great  lessons  which  make  it 
stronger  and  more  supple  in  the  practical  affairs  of 
life.  Each  of  these  studies  of  mine  brings  its  own 
lesson,  artistic  or  ethical,  important  or  unimportant ; 
its  lesson  of  seeking  certainty  in  our  moral  opinions, 
beauty  in  all  and  whatever  our  forms  of  art,  spirituality 
in  our  love.  But  besides  these  I  seem  to  perceive 
another  deduction,  an  historical  fact  with  a  practical 
application  ;  to  see  it  as  the  result  not  merely  perhaps 
of  the  studies  of  which  this  book  is  the  fruit,  but  of 
those  further  studies,  of  the  subtler  sides  of  Mediaeval 
and  Renaissance  life  and  art  which  at  present  occupy 
my  mind  and  may  some  day  add  another  series 
of  essays  to  this  :  a  lesson  still  vague  to  myself,  but 
which,  satisfactorily  or  unsatisfactorily,  I  shall  never- 
theless attempt  to  explain  ;  if  indeed  it  requires  to  be 
brought  home  to  the  reader. 

Of  the  few  forms  of  feeling  and  imagination  which 
3  have  treated — things  so  different  from  one  another 
as  the  feeling  for  nature  and  the  chivalric  poem,  as 
modern  art,  with  its  idealism  and  realism,  and  modern 
love — of  these  forms,  emotional  and  artistic,  which 
Antiquity  did  not  know,  or  knew  but  little,  the 
reader  may  have  observed  that  I  have  almost  in- 
variably traced  the  origin  deep  into  that  fruitful 
cosmopolitan  chaos,  due  to  the  mingling  of  all  that 
was  still  unused  of  the  remains  of  Antiquity  with 
all  that  was  untouched  of  the  intellectual  and  moral 
riches  of  the   barbarous    nations,  to  which    we    give 


412  EUPHORION. 

the  name  of  Middle  Ages  ;  and  that  I  have,  as  in- 
variably, followed  the  development  of  these  precious 
forms,  and  their  definitive  efflorescence  and  fruit- 
bearing,  into  that  particular  country  where  certain 
mediaeval  conditions  had  ceased  to  exist,  namely  Italy. 
In  other  words,  it  has  seemed  to  me  that  the  things 
which  I  have  studied  were  originally  produced  during 
the  Middle  Ages,  and  consequently  in  the  medieval 
countries,  France,  Germany,  Provence ;  but  did  not 
attain  maturity  except  in  that  portion  of  the  Middle 
Ages  which  is  medieeval  no  longer,  but  already  more 
than  half  modern,  the  Renaissance,  which  began  in 
Italy  not  with  the  establishment  of  despotisms  and 
the  coming  of  Greek  humanists,  but  with  the  indepen- 
dence of  the  free  towns  and  with  the  revival  of  Roman 
tradition. 

Why  so  ?  Because,  it  appears  to  me,  after  watch- 
ing the  lines  of  my  thought  converging  to  this  point, 
because,  with  a  few  exceptions,  the  Middle  Ages  were 
rich  in  great  beginnings  (indeed  a  good  half  of  all 
that  makes  up  our  present  civilization  seems  to  issue 
from  them) :  but  they  were  poor  in  complete  achieve- 
ments ;  full  of  the  seeds  of  modern  institutions,  arts, 
thoughts,  and  feelings,  they  yet  show  us  but  rarely 
the  complete  growth  of  any  one  of  them  :  a  fruitful 
Nile  flood,  but  which  must  cease  to  drown  and  to 
wash  away,  which  must  subside  before  the  germs 
that  it  has  brought  can  shoot  forth  and  mature. 
The  sense  of  this  comes  home  to  me  most  powerfully 


EPILOGUE.  443 

whenever  I  think  of  mediaeval  poetry  and  mediaeval 
painting. 

The  songs  of  the  troubadours  and  minnesingers, 
what  are  they  to  our  feelings  ?  They  are  pleasant, 
even  occasionally  beautiful,  but  they  are  empty, 
lamentably  empty,  charming  arrangements  of  words  ; 
poetry  which  fills  our  mind  or  touches  our  heart 
comes  only  with  the  Tuscan  lyrists  of  the  thirteenth 
century.  The  same  applies  to  mediseval  narrative- 
verse  :  it  is,  with  one  or  two  exceptions  or  half  ex- 
ceptions, such  as  "  The  Chanson  de  Roland "  and 
Gottfried's  "Tristan  und  Isolde,"  decidedly  weari- 
some ;  a  thing  to  study,  but  scarcely  a  thing  to 
delight  in.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  the  old  legends 
of  Wales  and  Scandinavia,  subsequently  embodied  by 
the  French  and  German  poets  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
are  without  imaginative  or  emotional  interest ;  nothing 
can  be  further  from  my  thoughts.  The  Nibelung 
story  possesses,  both  in  the  Norse  and  in  the  Middle 
High  German  version,  a  tragic  fascination  ;  and  a 
quaint  fairy-tale  interest,  every  now  and  then  rising 
to  the  charm  of  a  Decameronian  novella,  is  possessed 
by  many  of  the  Keltic  tales,  whether  briefly  told  in 
the  Mabinogion  or  lengthily  detailed  by  Chrestien  de 
Troyes  and  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach.  But  all  this 
is  the  interest  of  the  mere  story,  and  you  would 
enjoy  it  almost  as  much  if  that  story  were  related  not 
by  a  poet  but  by  a  peasant  ;  it  is  the  fascination  of 
the    mere  theme,  with  the  added  fascination  of  our 


444  E  UP  HO  R  ION. 

own  unconscious  filling  up  and  colouring  of  details. 
And  the  poem  itself,  whence  we  extract  this  theme, 
remains,  for  the  most  part,  uninteresting.  The  figures 
are  vague,  almost  shapeless  and  colourless  ;  they  have 
no  well-understood  mental  and  moral  anatomy,  so 
that  when  they  speak  and  act  the  writer  seems  to 
have  no  clear  conception  of  the  motives  or  tempers 
which  make  them  do  so  ;  even  as  in  a  child's  pictures, 
the  horses  gallop,  the  men  run,  the  houses  stand,  but 
without  any  indication  of  the  muscles  which  move 
the  horse,  of  the  muscles  which  hold  up  the  man,  of 
the  solid  ground  upon  which  is  built,  nay  rather, 
into  which  is  planted,  the  house.  Hatred  of  Hagen, 
devotion  of  Riidger,  passionate  piety  of  Parzival — all 
these  are  things  of  which  we  do  not  particularly  see 
the  how  or  why  ;  we  do  not  follow  the  reasons,  in 
event  or  character,  which  make  these  men  sacrifice 
themselves  or  others,  weep,  storm,  and  so  forth  ;  nay, 
even  when  these  reasons  are  clear  from  the  circum- 
stances, we  are  not  shown  the  action  of  the  mechanism, 
we  do  not  see  how  Brunhilt  is  wroth,  how  Chriemhilt 
is  revengeful,  how  Herzeloid  is  devoted  to  Parzival. 
There  is,  in  the  vast  majority  of  this  mediseval  poetry, 
no  clear  conception  of  the  construction  and  functions 
of  people's  character,  and  hence  no  conception  either 
of  those  actions  and  reactions  of  various  moral  organs 
which,  after  all,  are  at  the  bottom  of  the  events  related. 
Herein  lies  the  difference  between  the  forms  of  the 
Middle  Ages  and  those  of  Antiquity  ;  for  how  per- 


EPILOGUE.  445 

fectly  felt,  understood,  is  not  every  feeling  and  every 
action  of  the  Homeric  heroes,  how  perfectly  indicated  ! 
We  can  see  the  manner  and  reason  of  the  conflict 
of  Achilles  and  Agamemnon,  of  the  behaviour  of  the 
returned  Odysseus,  as  clearly  as  we  see  the  manner 
and  reason  of  the  movements  of  the  fighting  Centaurs 
and  Lapithae,  or  the  Amazons  ;  nay,  even  the  minute 
mood  of  comparatively  unimportant  figures,  as  Helen, 
Brisei's,  and  Nausicaa,  is  indicated  in  its  moral  anatomy 
and  attitude  as  distinctly  as  is  the  manner  in  which 
the  maidens  of  the  Parthenon  frieze  slovv^ly  restrain 
their  steps,  the  boys  curb  their  steeds,  or  the  old  men 
balance  their  oil  jars.  Nothing  of  this  in  mediaeval 
literature,  except  perhaps  in  "Flamenca"  and  "Tris- 
tan," where  the  motive  of  action,  mere  imaginative 
desire,  is  all-permeating  and  explains  everything. 
These  people  clearly  had  no  interest,  no  perception, 
connected  with  character :  a  valorous  woman,  a 
chivalrous  knight,  an  insolent  steward,  a  jealous 
husband,  a  faithful  retainer  ;  things  recognized  only 
in  outline,  made  to  speak  and  act  only  according  to 
a  fixed  tradition,  without  knowledge  of  the  internal 
mechanism  of  motive  ;  these  sufficed.  Hence  it  is 
that  mediaeval  poetry  is  always  like  mediaeval  paint- 
ing (for  painting  continued  to  be  mediaeval  with 
Giotto's  pupils  long  after  poetry  had  ceased  to  be 
mediaeval  with  Dante  and  his  school),  where  the 
Virgin  sits  and  holds  the  child  without  body  where- 
with to  sit  or  arms  wherewith  to  hold  ;  where  angels 


446  EUPHORION. 

tlutter  forward  and  kneel  in  conventional  greeting,  with 
obviously  no  bended  knees  beneath  their  robes,  nay, 
with  knees,  waist,  armpits,  all  anywhere ;  where  men 
ride  upon  horses  without  flat  to  their  back  ;  where 
processions  of  the  blessed  come  forth,  guided  by 
fiddling  seraphs,  vague,  faint  faces,  sweet  or  grand, 
heads  which  might  wave  like  pieces  of  cut-out  paper 
upon  their  necks,  arms  and  legs  here  and  there,  not 
clearly  belonging  to  any  one  ;  creatures  marching, 
soaring,  flying,  singing,  fiddling,  without  a  bone  or  a 
muscle  wherewith  to  do  it  all.  And  meanwhile,  in  this 
mediaeval  poetry,  as  in  this  mediaeval  painting,  there 
are  yards  and  yards  of  elaborate  preciousness  :  all  the 
embossed  velvets,  all  the  white-and-gold-shot  brocades, 
all  the  silks  and  satins,  and  jewel-embroidered  stufis 
of  the  universe  cast  stiffly  about  these  phantom  men 
and  women,  these  phantom  horses  and  horsemen.  It 
is  not  until  we  turn  to  Italy,  and  to  the  Northern 
man,  Chaucer,  entirely  under  Italian  influence,  that 
we  obtain  an  approach  to  the  antique  clearness  of 
perception  and  comprehension  ;  that  we  obtain  not 
only  in  Dante  something  akin  to  the  muscularities 
of  Signorelli  and  Michael  Angelo  ;  but  in  Boccaccio 
and  Chaucer,  in  Cavalca  and  Petrarch,  the  equivalent 
of  the  well-understood  movement,  the  well-indicated 
situation  of  the  simple,  realistic  or  poetic,  sketches  of 
Filippino  and  Botticelli. 

This,  you  will  say,  is  a  mere  impression  ;  it  is  no 
explanation,  still    less    such  an    explanation   as  may 


EPILOGUE.  447 

afford  a  lesson.  Not  so.  This  strange  inconclusive- 
ness  in  all  mediaeval  things,  till  the  moment  comes 
when  they  cease  to  be  mediaeval ;  this  richness  in 
germs  and  poverty  in  mature  fruit,  cannot  be  without 
its  reason.  And  this  reason,  to  my  mind,  lies  in  one 
word,  the  most  terrible  word  of  any,  since  it  means 
suffering  and  hopelessness  ;  a  word  which  has  haunted 
my  mind  ever  since  I  have  looked  into  mediaeval 
things  :  the  word  Wastefulness.  Wastefulness  ;  the 
frightful  characteristic  of  times  at  once  so  rich  and 
so  poor,  the  explanation  of  the  long  starvation  and 
sickness  that  mankind,  that  all  mankind's  concerns 
— art,  poetry,  science,  life — endured  while  the  very 
things  which  would  have  fed  and  revived  and  nurtured, 
existed  close  at  hand,  and  in  profusion.  Wastefulness, 
in  this  great  period  of  confusion,  of  the  most  precious 
things  that  we  possess  :  time,  thought,  and  feeling 
refused  to  the  realities  of  the  world,  and  lavished  on 
the  figments  of  the  imagination.  Why  this  vagueness, 
this  imperfection  in  all  mediaeval  representations  of 
life  ?  Because  even  as  men's  eyes  were  withdrawn, 
by  the  temporal  institutions  of  those  days,  from  the 
sight  of  the  fields  and  meadows  which  were  left  to 
the  blind  and  dumb  thing  called  serf;  so  also  the 
thoughts  of  mankind,  its  sympathy  and  intentions, 
were  withdrawn  from  the  mere  earthly  souls,  the 
mere  earthly  wrongs  and  woes  of  men  by  the  great 
self-organized  institution  of  mediaeval  religion.  Pity 
of  the  body  of  Christ  held  in  bondage  by  the  Infidel ; 
love   of  God  ;   study  of  the   unknowable   things   of 


448  EUPHORION. 

Heaven  :  such  are  the  noblest  employments  of  the 
mediaeval  soul  ;  how  much  of  pity,  of  love,  may 
remain  for  man  ;  how  much  of  study  for  the  know- 
able  ?  To  Wastefulness  like  this — to  misapplication 
of  mind  ending  almost  in  palsy — must  we  ascribe,  I 
think,  the  strange  sterility  of  such  mediaeval  art  as 
deals  not  merely  with  pattern,  but  with  the  reality 
of  man's  body  and  soul.  And  we  might  be  thankful, 
if,  during  our  wanderings  among  mediaeval  things, 
we  had  seen  the  starving  of  only  art  and  artistic 
instincts  ;  but  the  soul  of  man  has  lain  starving  also  ; 
starving  for  the  knowledge  which  w^as  sought  only  of 
Divine  things,  starving  for  the  love  which  was  given 
only  to  God. 

The  explanation,  therefore,  and  its  lesson,  may  thus 
be  summed  up  in  the  one  word  Wastefulness.  And 
the  fruitfulness  of  the  Renaissance,  all  that  it  has 
given  to  us  of  art,  of  thought,  of  feeling  (for  the  "  Vita 
Nuova  "  is  its  fruit),  is  due,  as  it  seems  to  me,  to  the 
fact  that  the  Renaissance  is  simply  the  condition  of 
civilization  when,  thanks  to  the  civil  liberty  and  the 
spiritual  liberty  inherited  from  Rome  and  inherited 
from  Greece,  man's  energies  of  thought  and  feeling 
were  withdrawn  from  the  unknowable  to  the  know- 
able,  from  Heaven  to  Earth  ;  and  were  devoted  to 
the  developing  of  those  marvellous  new  things  which 
Antiquity  had  not  known,  and  which  had  lain  neg 
lected  and  wasted  during  the  Middle  Ages. 

Florence,  January.,  1 8S4. 


APPENDIX. 


30 


APPENDIX. 


1  HAVE  seen  the  pictures  and  statues  and  towns  which  I  have 
described,  and  I  have  read  the  books  of  which  I  attempt  to  give 
an  impression  ;  but  here  my  original  research,  if  such  it  may  be 
called,  comes  to  an  end.  I  have  trusted  only  to  myself  for  my 
impressions  ;  but  I  have  taken  from  others  everything  that  may 
be  called  historical  fact,  as  distinguished  from  the  history  of  this 
or  that  form  of  thought  or  of  art  which  I  have  tried  to  elaborate. 
My  references  are  therefore  only  to  standard  historical  works, 
and  to  such  editions  of  poets  and  prose  writers  as  have  come 
into  my  hands.  How  much  I  am  endebted  to  the  genius  of 
Michelet  ;  nay,  rather,  how  much  I  am,  however  unimportant, 
the  thing  made  by  him,  every  one  will  see  and  judge.  With 
regard  to  positive  information  I  must  express  my  great  obliga- 
tions to  the  works  of  Jacob  Burckhardt,  of  Prof.  Villari,  and  of 
Mr.  J.  A.  Symonds  in  everything  that  concerns  the  political 
history  and  social  condition  of  the  Renaissance.  Mr.  Symonds' 
name  I  have  placed  last,  although  this  is  by  no  means  the  order 
of  importance  in  which  the  three  writers  appear  in  my  mind, 
because  vanity  compels  me  to  state  that  I  have  deprived  myself 
of  the  pleasure  and  profit  of  reading   his  volumes  on  Italian 


452  EUPHORION. 

literature,  from  a  fear  that  finding  myself  doubtless  forestalled 
by  him  in  various  appreciations,  I  might  deprive  my  essays  of 
what  I  feel  to  be  their  principal  merit,  namely,  the  spontaneity 
and  wholeness  of  personal  impression.  With  regard  to  philo- 
logical lore,  I  may  refer,  among  a  number  of  other  works, 
to  M.  Gaston  Paris'  work  on  the  Cycle  of  Charlemagne,  M. 
de  la  Villemarqui^'s  companion  volume  on  Keltic  romances,  and 
Professor  Rajna's  "  Fonti  dell'  Ariosto."  My  knowledge  of  trouba- 
dours, trouveres,  and  minnesingers  is  obtained  mainly  from  the 
great  collections  of  Raynouard,  Wackernagel,  Matzner,  Bartsch,. 
and  Von  der  Hagen,  and  from  Bartsch's  and  Simrock's  editions 
and  versions  of  Gottfried  von  Strassburg,  Hartmann  von  Aue, 
and  Wolfram  von  Eschenbach.  "  Flamenca  "  I  have  read  in 
Professor  Paul  Meyer's  beautiful  edition,  text  and  translation ; 
"  Aucassin  et  Nicolette,"  in  an  edition  published,  if  I  remember 
rightly,  by  Janet  ;  and  also  in  a  very  happy  translation  con- 
tained in  Delvau's  huge  collection  of  "  Romans  de  Chevalerie," 
which  contains,  unfortunately  sometimes  garbled,  as  many  of 
the  prose  stories  of  the  Carolingian  and  Amadis  cycle  as  I,  at 
all  events,  could  endure  to  read.  For  the  early  Italian  poets, 
excepting  Carducci's  "  Cino  da  Pistoia,"  my  references  are  the 
same  as  those  in  Rossetti's  "  Dante  and  his  Cycle,"  especially  the 
"  Rime  Antiche  "  and  the  "  Poeti  del  Primo  Secolo."  Professor 
d'Ancona's  pleasant  volume  has  greatly  helped  me  in  the  history 
of  the  transformation  of  the  courtly  poetry  of  the  early  Middle 
Ages  into  the  folk  poetry  of  Tuscany.  I  owe  a  good  deal  also, 
with  regard  to  this  same  essay  "  The  Outdoor  Poetry,"  to  Ros- 
koffs  famous  "  Geschichte  des  Teufels,"  and  to  Signor  Novati's 
recently  published  "  Carmina  Medii  .^Evi."  The  Italian  no- 
vellieri,  Bandello,  Cinthio,  and  their  set,  I  have  used  in  the 
Florentine  editions  of  1820  or  1825  ;  Masuccio  edited  by  De 
Sanctis.  For  the  essay  on  the  Italian  Renaissance  on  the 
Elizabethan  Stage,  I  have  had  recourse,  chiefly,  to  the  fifteenth 
century  chronicles  in  the  "  Archivio  Storico  Italiano,"  and  to 


APPENDIX.  453 

Dyce's  Webster,  Hartley  Coleridge's  Massinger  and  Ford, 
Churton  Collins'  Cyril  Tourneur,  and  J.  O.  Halliwell's 
Marston. 

The  essays  on  art  have  naturally  profited  by  the  now  inevitable 
Crowe  and  Cavalcaselle  ;  but  in  this  part  of  my  work,  while 
I  have  relied  very  little  on  books,  I  have  received  more  than 
the  equivalent  of  the  information  to  be  obtained  from  any  writers 
in  the  suggestions  and  explanations  of  my  friend  Mr.  T.  Nelson 
MacLean,  who  has  made  it  possible  for  a  mere  creature  of  pens 
and  ink  to  follow  the  diiterences  of  technique  of  the  sculptors 
and  medallists  of  the  fifteenth  century  ;  a  word  of  thanks  also, 
for  various  such  suggestions  as  can  come  only  from  a  painter, 
to  my  old  friend  Mr.  John  S.  Sargent,  of  Paris. 

I  must  conclude  these  acknowledgments  by  thanking  the 
Editors  of  the  Contemporary,  British  Quarterly,  and  National 
Reviews,  and  of  the  Cornhill  Magazine,  for  permission  to  re- 
publish such  of  the  essays  or  fragments  of  essays  as  have 
already  appeared  in  those  periodicals 


THE    END. 


UNWIN  BROTHERS, 
CHELWORTH   AND   LONDON. 


AA    000  886131 


£ci.  •J 


CENTRAL  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
University  of  California,  San  Diego 

DATE  DUE 

JUN30  1974 

JUN  i5  8eGl 

CI  39 

UCSD  Libr. 

